San Francisco Mime Troupe’s “Schooled” | Berkeley

The Tony Award-winning San Francisco Mime Troupe continues its 2022 season with more free and lively performances in park settings around the Bay Area with their 2022 production “Back to the Way Things Were.”

San Francisco Mime Troupe | 2022
Free political theater & music in parks all over the Bay Area
Various dates: July 2 – Sept. 5, 2022
SF, Berkeley, Oakland, Palo Alto, and more
FREE (donations requested)

See the full 2022 schedule

Founded in 1959, the San Francisco Mime Troupe creates and produces socially relevant theater; despite the name “mime,” their work is not pantomime, but live musical comedy and political satire.

Thankfully, this has nothing to do with painted faces silently annoying you. The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which started free park performances in 1962, doesn’t do silent pantomime. They ‘mime’ in that they mimic. And it’s all about satire and poking those in power. The cast talks (and sings, backed by a live band), to create a political musical theater show from a worker’s rights point of view. After two years off, this year’s show is aptly named “Back to the Way Things Were.”

About “Back to the Way Things Were”
In a country where we can finally stop wearing masks to get pizza and go to the movies, and where we again have a president who isn’t dumb as a two dollar ham, hard-working, middle-aged liberals Ralph and Alice wistfully yearn for The before Times, when things seemed normal. But for Zoe – their twenty-something daughter who grew up in a world of climate change, housing crashes, student debt, the rise of dictatorships and the fall of democracies – there is no “better” to go back to. For her the purgatory of the last two years was just a pause from life in Hell. So what’s the point? Isn’t it easier to just give up?