STAGE REVIEW : ‘Ripped Van Winkle’ Tears Into the Yuppie Life Style of the ‘80s

You’ve got to hand it to the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

It is 30 years young and still going with undiminished fervor and a gift for comic deflation that doesn’t hesitate to extend to self-mockery if that’ll do the trick.

It does the trick in “Ripped Van Winkle.” Seen at Culver City High’s Robert Frost Auditorium (where this send-up of the ‘80s played Friday and Saturday), “Ripped” ripped right into ‘60s activism, the beating heart of the Mime Troupe’s origins. The idea: to show us how far we have fallen since.

As always with Joan Holden, the Troupe’s resident playwright, plot is secondary to motive, though not necessarily inferior to it. Some of her spoofs have been better than others. “Ripped” is among the best.

Imagine what happens when a ‘60s flower child named Rip (Arthur Holden) goes on an acid trip in 1968 that takes him 20 years to sleep off. He wakes up under a pile of compost in Golden Gate Park to discover it’s an ‘80s world out there. Yuppies are rampant. Pushers carry cellular phones. Everyone’s into fitness, power, greed, while this dude still figures he’s on his way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. When Rip thinks Ronald Reagan, he’s thinking governor .

It’s pure culture shock. “Everybody was in the movement,” recalls Rip’s former girlfriend, Susan (Sharon Lockwood), who never figured out where Rip vanished. “Then everybody had a baby, then everybody got into healing, then. . . . It gets vague.” Susan herself is now the mother of her own teen-age rebel (Keiko Shimosato) and into screwy promotional schemes, such as re-creating in San Francisco Bay the scene of the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri.

There are typical Mime Troupe sequences: Rip meeting the homeless as they compare shelters and giveaway meals; Rip meeting fashion-plate joggers and black dudes with ghetto-blasters who don’t like to be called “brother”; Rip discovering pyramid high-rises and 20-cent phone calls--and a mirror that tells that he’s over 30. “I’m gonna come down,” he groans. “I’m startin’ not to like this trip.”

Two scenes make the evening: one in which yuppie shoppers gorge on gadgets (“Shopping is the opiate of the ‘80s”)--and one in an upscale restaurant, where the breathless waiter (Mark Christopher Lawrence) says, “Hi, I’m Mark, I’m your waiter,” as though it were the annunciation, where you’re judged by the exoticism of your order and where the greatest humiliation is a credit card that has run out of credit.

Holden’s play makes us laugh and think at the same time, something we don’t get asked to do very often. There’s plenty of seriousness behind the jokes and the play ends with the right epiphany: with Rip and Susan reunited and, after an amusing rundown of events of the past two decades, the discovery of who laid that heavy-duty acid trip on him--and why. It’s a deeper philosophical moment than you might expect.

The overall production is the Mime Troupe’s usual ramshackle street-theater affair (we wouldn’t want it otherwise), but make no mistake: The images are astute, the message incisive, the music sharp.

Six actors played most of the parts, with a little help from musicians Dan Hart, Barrett Nelson and Randy Craig. (These guys even had a number all to themselves.) Lawrence, in a series of comic roles, displayed an absolutely dead-on sense of character. His P.J., a sort of soothsaying Fat Albert, was hilarious.

Audrey Smith was good no matter what gender or what part she was in. Lockwood, Holden and Shimosato in running roles had less room for flash, but Ed Holmes, in a collection of widely divergent characters, proved he was born in the wrong century. With his bulging eyes and broad style, he’s a commedia dell’arte natural.

Much as it kids around on stage, this award-winning Troupe doesn’t kid around about its liberal views. Half the proceeds from the Los Angeles performances are destined for hurricane relief efforts in Nicaragua. It’s too bad the show’s already gone. Apparently, the Mime Troupe’s rousing, joyous and unshackled brand of social and political activism could not command a longer run. How perfectly symptomatic it is of the ‘80s--that decade the show has such fun skewering.