Theater review: Mime Troupe takes Tenderloin on tour in musical ‘Breakdown’
From the plight of unhoused people in San Francisco to right-wing media’s demonization of the city, there’s a lot going on in “Breakdown,” the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s latest musical political satire playing for free in Bay Area parks. It comes to Mill Valley on July 27.
Written by Michael Gene Sullivan with Marie Cartier and directed by Sullivan, “Breakdown” loosely follows three main characters and a whole bunch of supporting ones, deftly played by the nimble cast of five.
Kina Kantor is sympathetically dazed as Yume, a young unhoused woman dealing with some severe mental health issues triggered whenever anyone mentions family. She’s bedeviled by a monstrous masked figure in a terrific costume by Keiko Shimosato Carreiro, menacing her with an echoing ghostly laugh.
Yume camps out on the Tenderloin doorstep of a kindly immigrant shopkeeper played with comic flair by Andre Amarotico, who keeps rambling on about what they say back home in Greece. Jed Parsario is bursting with entrepreneurial hustle as Felix, an ambitious unhoused kid always coming up with hilarious get-rich-quick plans themed around homelessness.
We also follow Alicia M.P. Nelson as an overworked and preternaturally patient social worker who’s supposed to be taking a sick day to rest and relax but keeps getting called by her stressed-out manager (pricelessly played by Parsario) who’s always telling her to try to relax on her day off but also that new clients need her help immediately. It doesn’t help that her housemates —Amarotico as a childish professional gamer and Jamella Cross as a pretentious online influencer— are always complaining about something or other as they work from home in the same room.
Nelson also appears as a prim middle-class senior citizen who’s lost her home to the bank, now clutching a suitcase and wandering bewildered in search of shelter.
There’s a whole other thread about a Fox News reporter named Marcia Stone, struggling to come up with new ways to call San Francisco a hellhole in TV segments dutifully attacking the city “where communist drag queens rule and the streets are paved with sin.” Cross plays Marcia with a perfect blend of commanding charisma and opportunistic ambition. Her only saving grace is that her bosses are even worse.
Parsario plays a lecherous manager always accompanied by rattlesnake noises by the band, and Amarotico appears as Rupert Murdoch with a shaky quasi-Australian accent and a ludicrous bald wig.
The play never shows the effect the right-wing propaganda has on people and public policy, but anyone attending knows all that already. As entertaining as Marcia’s scenes are, hers is a thread without any particular arc or progress. She and other characters briefly collide without leaving much impact on each other.
The three-piece SFMT Band delivers cartoonish sound effects and musical director Daniel Savio’s entertaining songs in a variety of styles. The catchiest of these is Marcia’s rocking anthem about hewing to the right-wing party line to get ahead as a Black woman in this country.
There are a couple of bizarre gesticulating dance sequences choreographed by AeJay Mitchell that are almost like abstract dream ballets of bureaucracy or life on the street.
Carlos Aceves’ portable set compellingly depicts a distorted doorstep and the silhouette of a woman’s profile with abuilding interior cross-section visible in her hair.
It’s a lively, fast-paced show whose 90 minutes speed by in one comical encounter after another, so you might not even notice that it’s a half hour before any characters recur, let alone intersect. Once everything starts to come together, the story suddenly comes to a close.
Amid all the laughs, the show highlights some of the systemic issues that keep so many people down and out, but talk of what can be done is mostly left for post-show speeches. “Breakdown” paints an intriguing portrait of ways in which the social contract has broken down, but where we and the characters go from here is left up in the air.
Sam Hurwitt is a Bay Area arts journalist and playwright. Contact him at shurwitt@gmail.com or on Twitter at twitter.com/shurwitt.
IF YOU GO
What: “Breakdown”
When and where: Through Sept. 4; various locations and times, including 7 p.m. July 27 at Mill Valley Community Center at 180 Camino Alto in Mill Valley
Admission: Free (donations accepted)
Information: 415-285-1717, sfmt.org
Rating (out of five stars): ★★★★