The Long Haul

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More About

• Ronald Reagan
• The Moscone Center
• National Endowment for the Arts

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe’s first play was a blackface minstrel show, in 1965. The most racist kind of theater ever for the most left-wing theater company in the country? A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel was satirical, of course; it was written and performed by a multiracial group, and clearly flipped the bird to a government and mentality which at the time sanctioned those infamous segregated water fountains and other horrible bullshit. In the ensuing 50 years, the company changed — especially after the Reagan administration decimated the National Endowment for the Arts. But it’s still chugging along with political criticism in the form of musical theater performed for free in public parks, the latest of which was Too Big to Fail this past summer. At the San Francisco Mime Troupe 50th Birthday Bash, one of the group’s classics is revived for one night only: Ghosts, which points out, via A Christmas Carol, that 10,000 people lost their homes so Moscone Center could be built. What? You never heard about that?
Thu., Dec. 10, 7:30 p.m., 2009