S.F. Mime Troupe Takes Trade Route : Theater: Left-wing collective, coming to Irvine, dramatizes global economy casualties.

Trade politics makes strange protectionist allies--even in theater.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe, a left-wing theater collective with roots in the freedom-riding ‘60s, finds itself agreeing with Republican right-winger Pat Buchanan in its current touring show, “Offshore,” about the human cost of the global economy.

“It feels weird being on the same side as he is,” the troupe’s resident playwright, Joan Holden, admitted recently during a telephone interview from San Francisco. “But in a way I like it. We’re often accused of being predictable. I like when we’re not.”

“Offshore,” which comes to UC Irvine’s Fine Arts Village Theatre tonight after stops throughout the Southland (review, F8), dramatizes assorted casualties of the Pacific Rim’s burgeoning international marketplace with a song-and-dance fusion of theatrical styles from Kabuki and Chinese opera to commedia dell’arte.

Not least among the casualties are this country’s factory workers, whose presumed loss of jobs is Buchanan’s (and organized labor’s) favorite reason for opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

Although NAFTA is never mentioned by name in “Offshore,” Holden said, “I think NAFTA is the wrong trade agreement, and certainly the play weighs in against it. We ask, ‘Why are we throwing our borders open to big money and not considering the consequences?’ ”

Somebody at UCI must have had a crystal ball in booking the production. Just as the curtain rises on “Offshore” tonight at 8, the House of Representatives is expected to end debate on the free-trade bill and begin its crucial vote.

On Thursday, moreover, President Clinton heads to Seattle for the first meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference. As one report recently put it, “Every issue about jobs and the flow of wealth raised in the debate over NAFTA looms even larger in the Pacific.”

The mime troupe actually started thinking about “Offshore” more than a year ago, Holden said, at the suggestion of ensemble member Keiko Shimosato, a first generation Japanese-American actor who felt her sense of cultural identification had not been addressed by the troupe’s recent productions.

“Our first impulse was to deal with the idea that the Pacific was shrinking,” Holden recalled. “We were feeling that we don’t live on the western coast of Euro-America as much we live on the eastern shore of Asia.

“We wanted a play that dealt with trade and immigration, with jobs leaving and immigrants coming, with the collision between California and Asia. We had a topic--including immigrant-bashing and all the paranoia of that--but we didn’t have a story.”

Holden said several troupe members went overseas to seek out theater artists in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Manila and Japan. Ultimately, in collaboration with artists they met there, the group came up with a plot about all sorts of commercial trade machinations affecting the lives of about 18 people on both sides of the Pacific.

The characters--played by six actors in multiple roles--include a Japanese tycoon, the daughter he is trying to marry off, her lover (an expatriate American bar hostess in Tokyo), a U.S. trade negotiator, a microchip manufacturer in the Sacramento Valley, a security guard at the microchip factory, and a Chinese-American entrepreneur.

It’s no surprise that the troupe has focused on a multicultural crisis. Since its founding by R.G. Davis in 1959, the troupe often has staged productions reflecting varied cultures. In 1989, for example, it did a play called “Seeing Double,” a collaboration with Palestinian and Israeli artists. It also has produced such plays as “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle,” a reinterpretation of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” created with black artists.

Furthermore, the troupe’s stock-in-trade over the years has been its willingness to take on a wide range of political and economic issues--everything from CIA drug-running in Latin America (“The Dragon Lady’s Revenge”) to deindustrialization of the Midwest (“Steeltown”) to the Spanish Civil War (“Spain ‘36”).

The production that catapulted the troupe to notoriety in 1965 was a controversial collection of black-face sketches called “A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel.” Written by Davis and Saul Landau, it anticipated George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum,” a hard look at the status of blacks, by more than two decades.

“A Minstrel Show” was a cautionary satire about the difficulties of racial integration despite the victories of the civil rights movement. What made it a watershed event in the troupe’s history was that it began touring nationally under the sponsorship of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

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Two years later the troupe’s notoriety soared again when it toured the country with Holden’s anti-Vietnam War update of Goldoni’s “The Soldier Lover.” This time the troupe was sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society.

“We became the theater of the New Left,” says Holden, 54, who has been with the troupe ever since.

“Radical theater thrives in radical times. It’s good for the troupe when people are mad at the government. We shrank in the ‘70s. But the anti-radical ‘80s were good years for us, too, because there were a lot of people who got angry again. Now it’s harder. People are more confused. They’re depressed.”

She said the troupe operates on a $600,000 annual budget with 12 full-time members (six of them actors) and guest artists who are hired as needed. Although it owns a building for studio and office space, it concentrates on touring and does not have a permanent theater.

While some in the ensemble are too young to remember the troupe’s salad days in the ‘60s, Holden said, its artistic mission hasn’t changed much.

“Theater has a communal function,” she noted. “It crystallizes the hopes and fears, myths and nightmares of a community. I think we’re still doing that.”

Her own motives haven’t changed, either. “Back in 1969, I wanted revolution. Now I want social and economic justice and the planet not to be destroyed. But that’s what we meant by revolution anyway.”

Even with Pat Buchanan on the same side?

“We’re on the same side for different reasons,” she said.

Long live the revolution.

* The San Francisco Mime Troupe will perform “Offshore” tonight at 8 in the Fine Arts Village Theatre at UC Irvine, Campus Drive and Bridge Road, Irvine. $15. (714) 856-5000.