How the SF Mime Troupe is Surviving Financial Hurdles with Laughter
The balm of laughter is needed in these trying times where America seems on the cusp of transitioning from democracy to dictatorship. For lucky SF Bay Area residents, that balm in the form of musical comedy with a political bite has been provided by the venerable Obie- and Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe (hereafter “SFMT”).
SFMT’s shows, like certain government services, are free. But the events of recent months have demonstrated once again that just because would-be end users don’t shell out money up front doesn’t mean there are no costs at all to putting on SFMT’s shows.
In case you missed this recent spring’s “Cost of Free” campaign, the SFMT operates as a collective which spurns majority white casting and tells stories showing that the lives of people of color matter too. The National Endowment for the Arts has been a major SFMT funder in past years. However, thanks to the Orange Felon and his right-wing goon squad’s crusade to impose a “white people and culture uber alles” ideology on government-funded art institutions, the Endowment’s funding guidelines have been revised to make SFMT’s odds of getting future moneys from them far less likely than the survival odds of the proverbial frog trapped in a pot of boiling water. Private foundations can’t help because they understandably need to prioritize funding for social programs for people who aren’t the rich jerkwads fawned on by the Orange Dictator-Wannabe’s cadres.
The good news is, San Francisco government’s arts funds have taken up some of the SFMT’s financial slack. However, unless The City’s municipal government does something truly common-sensical such as taxing the rich at much more than the current pittance of a tax rate, these municipal arts funds will remain too underfunded to fully replace lost federal government money.
As a result, SFMT’s 66th season will have a truncated run starting from its traditional July 4 opening (this year, a Friday) at S.F.’s Dolores Park and ending on Sunday August 3, 2025 at Berkeley’s Live Oak Park. Both opening and ending shows start at 2 P.M while the start times for the other shows vary.
The new show’s title is Disruption – a Musical Farce, which takes satirical aim at a particular application of the Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things.” When something is broken, you generally have to replace it. The hard part is figuring out what the replacement will be and how it will work in practice. A government, for example, is a far different animal from a mass-produced iPad. SFMT’s new show involves someone who sadly doesn’t understand that point.
Hard-working son of immigrants Augie Dimalanta (Jed Parsario) works by day at the “Fried Thangs Diner.” By night (figuratively speaking), he helps his neighbors navigate San Francisco’s government bureaucracy in what’s increasingly seeming to be a little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike enterprise.
Tech genius Zubari Macintosh (Alicia M. P. Nelson) supposedly has the power and the answer to fix the problems of government bureaucracy. She’s the head of MOPS (Mayor’s Office Of Public Safety), and she’s all about “efficiency” and making The City “investor-friendly” for the “right kind of people” (she said in her best classist dog whistle). To her, a government is literally just a more complicated social media app. Those who want the government to provide for human needs they can’t fulfill themselves would strongly disagree with that interpretation. However, the likes of working-class red-hatted cop Hector Washington (Michael Gene Sullivan) are more concerned with removing from S.F.’s streets the human cost of income inequality. Will San Francisco finally become a new suburb of Silicon Valley? Or will it take a fire (figurative or otherwise) for a better S.F. to once again rise from the ashes?
Want to find out the answer? Then see the show! If you miss the Dolores Park opener, you can catch it at such venues as SF’s Yerba Buena Gardens, Oakland’s Lakeside Park, or Cotati’s La Plaza Park. Check out SFMT’s summer schedule here.
And while you’re at it, why not make a donation to SFMT’s Summer Appeal? Not only will your donation help the SFMT make it through 2025, but it could help make sure that it’ll be around in 2026 to publicly mock the fascists and plutocrats out there.
Howdy! My name is Katy Atchison and I'm an Associate Editor for Broke-Ass Stuart.
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