The San Francisco Mime Troupe isn’t likely to give up the changing-the-world job — ever. But they’ll continue to make you laugh all the while.
“Today I have to write a culminating scene,” says busy San Francisco actor/director/playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who’s been San Francisco Mime Troupe head writer for the past 22 years. “A lot of things have to come together.”
Cowritten with Marie Cartier, “Back to the Way . . .” is an extended version of the final radio play that the S.F. Mime Troupe aired during the dog days of the pandemic. As Sullivan explains, he and composer/lyricist/music director Daniel Savio knew that “the good old days weren’t that great” and aimed to explore that concept. Police brutality, “the war on immigrants,” climate change, civil rights . . . Sullivan ticks off a list.
He relished the opportunity to explore the dystopia that Zoe sees around her while at the same time showing what her parents see: the absence of “that constant dread that characterized the Trump/Covid years.
In crafting a play, Sullivan follows the structure he teaches his own playwriting students: a three-act play and within each scene, a setup, a conflict and a resolution. “It’s very mathematical, and also very Aristotelian,” he says. This is Brown’s first time to direct a Mime Troupe live park show; she directed some of the company’s radio work recently and has directed elsewhere. Her specialties as a director, she says, are working individually with actors on their emotional arcs and relationships within the play, creating a safe space where actors can experiment and helping them with the songs.
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