Labor & Employment Law

S.F. Mime Troupe Talks Union?Really?and Sings and Dances, Too

By Mike Hall

Let?s get one thing out of the way right off the bat?contrary to popular belief, mimes can talk. The silent mime we?re all accustomed to is just one form of the ancient theater art. Not only do mimes talk, they sing and dance in the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe?s ?Posibilidad, or Death of the Worker.?

The play (click on the accompanying video  for a preview) premiered last summer in California and tells the story of worker uprisings in two factories, one in San Francisco and one in Argentina.

Now the troupe?members of Actors’ Equity (AEA)?would love to bring it to a wider audience on the East Coast in a March ?Union Hall Tour.? The play is scheduled as part of the centennial activities honoring workers killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. Click here to see how you can help and here to read the San Francisco Labor Council?s (SFLC’s) resolution endorsing the tour.

Michael Gene Sullivan, the play?s author, director and an actor, says:

We want to reintroduce art as an important aspect of the struggle of the working class. We?ve lost the sight of workers? owning their labor and of respect for their labor. That?s one of the things that we really want to get across in the show.

Also what we want to get across is the respect that the country has lost for the laborer?this idea that wealth is created by investors and by bankers and by all these people who just deal with money  just deal with paper. We?re forgetting that at the base are the people who actually make things that make this country, that make any economy.

While that might sound like a weighty college seminar subject, the S.F. Mime Troupe pulls it off in a much more light-hearted effort, with zingy one-liners scattered in between the songs and the dance routines. The troupe?s website says the play looks at:

two teams of workers on two different continents, facing the same bitter reality of a system that sees workers as the problem, and dumps them in the name of profit. How will they react? Will they sit back and take it quietly? Will they fight for the back pay they are owed? Or will they…maybe…try to run the factories themselves…?

This play looks at the pressing questions: Who the heck are these jerks in suits who keep telling us we can’t do anything without them?

The San Francisco Bay Guardian described it as:

a shrewd, funny, tuneful plea for cooperatives against the grinning, co-opting tendencies of “capitalism with a human face.”

Sullivan told Huffington Post columnist Chris Weigant:

what I want from the audience is to question themselves. So much of the American working class has a limited view of change. We struggle for a seat at the table, but we don’t realize we built the table, and no one else would be there without us. We shouldn’t be fighting for a seat at the table; we should be fighting for the table.“

For more on the play and a longer interview with Sullivan and other troupe members, click here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 15, 2011 (boomark / email).