Joan Holden (at typewriter) with members of San Francisco Mime Troupe.
Joan Holden, for a few years the chief playwright of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, died on Jan. 19. She was 85.
It was an annual event I appeared ahead to throughout my quarter-century as a San Franciscan. On a summer time day, I’d head with mates to the grassy slopes of Delores Park, or to Washington Sq. Park within the coronary heart of North Seaside, to hitch a genial crowd gathered earlier than a transportable stage. A truck close by was emblazoned “The San Francisco Mime Troupe.”
A jazzy combo would swing into an upbeat mini-overture. After which the play would kick in: all the time topical, all the time political, however wooing you with gags and songs and broadly participating performing, whether or not the topic was Ronald Reagan’s presidency, U.S. navy involvement in Vietnam or Central America, cultural amnesia or working-class angst. Regardless of the topic, the manufacturing bristled with the witty dialogue, theatrical savvy, and political fervor of Joan Holden, the troupe’s chief playwright for a lot of its heyday.
The Mime Troupe has been an inspiring mannequin for a lot of different politically minded theatres and teatros within the U.S.. (Additionally it is the primary, and to this point solely, political theatre outfit to win a Regional Theatre Tony Award, in 1987.) And the corporate continues to be regaling audiences in Bay Space parks, underneath the management of a brand new era of leaders, together with supervisor Ellen Callas and playwright-in-residence Michael Gene Sullivan.
However for a number of many years, Holden was the chief author and ingenious instigator of touring productions that boasted her signature mix of eager satire, au courant information flashes, power-to-the-people messaging and populist leisure. In her time with the troupe she wrote or co-wrote greater than 30 performs. She was, famous playwright Steve Most, the co-author with Holden and Jael Weisman of the Dell’Arte Gamers present The Loon’s Rage, a “nice collaborator.”
After I met Joan within the early Nineteen Eighties, I used to be a bit intimidated. I used to be a younger wannabe critic and a longtime Mime Troupe fan. She was so keenly clever, so feisty, so indefatigable. She didn’t mince phrases in an interview or in dialog, and had the uncommon reward of claiming precisely what she meant. She was additionally disarmingly humorous—and fiercely political.
The Mime Troupe was based in 1959 as a “guerrilla theatre” by R.G. Davis, who melded his leftist rules and fascination with Italian commedia dell’arte into radical park reveals that snagged worldwide consideration, notably the controversial anti-racist play A Minstrel Present or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel. (By the best way, “mime” for this troupe by no means meant silent.)
Within the late Nineteen Sixties, Joan fortunately joined the group. “One thing clicked: the quantity of power on the stage, the enjoyable that folks gave the impression to be having,” she instructed San Francisco Chronicle theatre critic Lily Janiak in a remaining interview. However an inventive and political schism developed, and Davis moved on. The Mime Troupe grew to become a theatrical collective that paid everybody the identical wages, eschewed star billing, and crafted reveals by generally hard-fought consensus.
As soon as Joan enlisted, the troupe rapidly had nationwide success with a number of sharply related Holden scripts. One was the feminist melodrama The Unbiased Feminine; one other, The Dragon Woman’s Revenge, an exceedingly intelligent adaptation (and subversion) of misogynistic, Asia-demonizing Hollywood movies, and an exposé of the CIA’s involvement within the Indo-Chinese language drug commerce. Dragon Woman traveled to New York and acquired the primary of the corporate’s three Obie Awards.
The Mime Troupe continued as a collective. A lot in order that, after I noticed a rehearsal at their funky Mission District warehouse headquarters, I used to be struck by how everybody—from the actors and musicians to the publicist and enterprise supervisor—voiced their opinions and concepts about how the present ought to develop.
That was simply effective with Joan. For all her militant anti-capitalism, and her energetic sparring with those that debated together with her, I additionally got here to know Joan as genuinely heat and inclusive, not a snob or lefty elitist. (She was additionally the loving mom of three daughters together with her longtime companion and Mime Troupe cohort, Dan Chumley.)
Again when it was hopelessly uncool, Joan instructed me she subscribed to Individuals journal to maintain her fingers on the heartbeat of mass “lowbrow” tradition. She liked to applicable genres and located inspiration for performs in comedian books, traditional films, and well-liked TV reveals, in addition to information accounts and investigative reporting. She all the time took joint credit score together with her collaborators, simply as such longtime Mime Troupe actors Sharon Lockwood, Joan Mankin, and others who absolutely animated Joan’s eclectic tales by no means received high billing.
Many Holden-led performs turned commonplace individuals into superheroes. A favourite of mine was Factwino Meets the Ethical Majority, which featured Barry “Shabaka” Henley as a homeless alcoholic who transforms right into a Superman-like character. As a substitute of bodily vanquishing adversaries, he pops as much as right the lies of right-wing politicians with confirmed information. (Man, do we want him now!) The present was outrageous, hilarious, and proper heading in the right direction.
One other hit that was amongst her finest was Ripped van Winkle, with a nod to the well-known Washington Irving story, through which a ’60s-era San Francisco hippie takes an acid journey that magically zonks him out till the late ’80s. He wakes as much as discover himself hilariously at odds with a metropolis and society steeped in greed and yuppie materialism—and there’s no extra counter to that tradition. He longs to “come down” off this bummer psychedelic time journey escapade, however there’s no turning again from the America he finds.
Joan retired from the Mime Troupe in 2000 however continued to put in writing performs. A notable one was an adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling guide Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a firsthand examine of the lives of low-paid staff. It debuted in 2002 at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre and has since had quite a few productions across the nation. A newer musical play, FSM, appeared again to an period Holden knew effectively to discover the influential Free Speech Motion at College of California in Berkeley throughout the ’60s. Produced by the senior theatre firm Stagebridge, with Daniel Savio (son of FSM chief Mario Savio) as co-composer, it premiered in 2014 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater Heart.
Regardless of how darkish her view of American mainstream politics and society, Joan’s performs all the time rallied in opposition to apathy and held out hope for extra consciousness and extra activism towards a extra simply nation. After I requested as soon as if she was simply “preaching to the choir,” she responded, “The choir nonetheless wants preaching.”
She held on to that perception into her 80s. In that final interview with Janiak, she extolled the aim of theatre as “consciousness elevating, exposing tough truths, explaining the world.” Joan did all these issues, after which some, for generations of lucky theatregoers.
Misha Berson (she/her) is the previous theatre critic of The Seattle Instances and the writer of a number of books on theatre, together with One thing’s Coming, One thing Good: West Aspect Story and the American Creativeness. She is presently a contract author and instructor, and a frequent contributor to American Theatre.
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