This Isn’t Your Cup of Tea?

When it comes to mimes, it’s time to break the silence:

People hate ‘em.

Mime is not something that often comes up in casual office conversation: “Hey, how ‘bout those mimes?” But bring up the subject in the form of an invitation to see Marcel Marceau--performing at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse through Sunday--and mime bashers come out of the closet, or maybe one of those boxes mimes always manage to get stuck in.

Here was a free ticket to see Marceau, the world’s greatest living mime, on opening night. But suddenly, friends of long standing were horribly busy. E-mail invitations went unanswered. Even my husband, who has a certain contractual obligation--how does that go, in sickness and in theater featuring performers in whiteface--was headed out of town on a business trip. Coincidence? I think not.

I could have sulked about this, but the fact is, I didn’t want to go either. I confess: I, too, hated mimes. The only reason I attended this performance was to research a compelling journalistic assignment--to find out why so many among us despise the mime.

Rebecca Wellner, the 10-year-old daughter of a college roommate who lives in Washington, is too young to respond to societal pressure to reject the form. Rebecca adores mimes. Why? “Because they can be anything, do anything, and make anything out of nothing,” Rebecca says.

That’s exactly what Marceau did. Here was mime, and I didn’t hate it. Marceau was marvelous, transcendent--and, at 79, doesn’t look half bad in the white stretch suit he wears as his hapless signature character, Bip. Any mime-haters in this audience were surely rendered speechless.

Yet outside of that particular box, it remains a bad time in history for mimes. Just ask Marceau’s assistant mimes, Gyongyi Biro, 35, and Alexander Neander, 32.

“We have to justify a lot; it is very difficult,” explains Biro, educated as an engineer in her native Romania before jettisoning that career to study mime at the Marceau school in Paris. “And they always say: Do something,” she adds, offering a quick rendition of hands-on-the-invisible-wall backstage at the Geffen. You don’t, she points out, ask a dentist to demonstrate a little oral surgery, just for fun.

Setting the Stage

Biro and Neander are Marceau’s presenters. This means getting into elaborate costume for the sole purpose of standing frozen in a formal pose for about 20 seconds before each segment of Marceau’s show, holding flags printed with the title of the piece His Mime-ness will perform next. Marceau’s lengthy repertoire includes “The Creation of the World,” “Walking Against the Wind” (Michael Jackson modeled his moonwalk on Marceau’s wind-walking technique), and “The Cage.” Then there’s “Bip Travels by Sea,” “Bip as a Street Musician,” “Bip Commits Suicide.” Occasionally, presenters’ duties include walking or other minor movement, but not much.

But presenting the world’s greatest mime is enough for Biro and Neander. Working with Marceau makes it worth explaining over and over that comparing Marceau’s art to the mimes you find scaring kids at birthday parties makes no more sense than comparing a street musician to Yo-Yo Ma. “I never even dreamt, in my very, very secret dreams, to be onstage with Marcel Marceau,” Biro says, wide-eyed.

The assistants get the chance to do more elaborate work as part of Marceau’s company, which does full-length “mimodramas.” But Neander, a Frenchman who fell in love with mime at age 9 when he first saw Marceau, relishes the challenge of expressing emotion while standing still as stone. “It seems perhaps to the public very short and static, but the thing is, Marcel Marceau, every time we do the position or the presentation, he is watching,” Neander says. “From the moment the lights come on, the attitude must be perfect--you can’t correct it.”

Adds Biro: “You have to have the spirit of the thing. That’s why some sculptures are good and some sculptures are not good. You look at the Michelangelo sculpture and you say, ‘Wow, he is expressing something,’ even though he is,” she laughs, “moveless.”

The word was exactly right, even though it does not exist. After this discussion, it seemed even more urgent to find out why so many people shun the opportunity to be moved by movelessness, as much a part of the magic of mime as walking against the wind. Time to consult the experts.

Once my mental block against mimes was shoved aside by Marceau, I remembered that I actually have a mime friend, Los Angeles writer-performer Charles Degelman. From 1967 to 1970, Degelman was part of the famed San Francisco Mime Troupe. He went on to become a founding member of the Pickle Family Circus.

Out of habit, Degelman gives the word the French pronunciation, “meem,” because that’s how the term was officially pronounced by the San Francisco Mime Troupe until 1970, when there came a social revolution. “It sounds facetious, but I’m telling the truth--in 1970, there was a policy decision made; rather than having this snooty French pronunciation, ‘meem,’ it was changed to mime so ‘the people’ could say it,” Degelman says.

Degelman stresses the difference between “pantomime” (bad) and “mime” (good), an important distinction he learned through R.G. Davis, founder of the San Francisco troupe, who studied with Etienne Decroux, a mentor of Marceau.

Borrowing from Davis and Decroux, Degelman defines pantomime as the “representation of objects in absentia”--say, pretending to play a guitar that isn’t there. Mime is the use of the body to become the thing. “If I were to mime the playing of a guitar, I would represent the guitar with my left arm extended, and flutter my fingers over my lips while I sang notes,” Degelman explains. He points out that, contrary to popular belief, mime does not require silence. “We used to shout at the top of our lungs,” he says.

The more abstract performance is, in Degelman’s words, “mime without the panto.” This should not be confused with mime without the pants, which is apparently what’s going on over at the Coronet Theatre in “Puppetry of the Penis.”

Where It All Went Wrong

Degelman blames public misconception of mimes both on the pervasiveness of cheap pantomime and on the 1970s--a decade that was on the whole an embarrassment to the century (think Watergate and the disco inferno).

The ‘70s, he says, marked the birth of “living theater”; it became chic to break down the implied “fourth wall” that separates an audience from the performers. Attempting to interact with the audience, either in the theater or on the streets, is a philosophical choice for the mime, not part of the form.

This tactic could inspire fear and loathing in any type of performance; just because you want to hear Yo-Yo Ma play the cello doesn’t mean you want him to follow you down the street and poke his bow in your ear. That’s not mime or pantomime; that’s just rude.

University of Tulsa psychologist Tom J. Brian says research shows that, in conversation, people are most comfortable when the other party stands 3 feet away. The in-your-face mime invades this personal space. With or without panto, this breed of mime is the annoying “close talker” made famous in a “Seinfeld” episode, only worse--a close talker who refuses to speak.

Who is to blame for this trend? Fingers point to Shields & Yarnell, the mime duo who started as ‘70s street performers in San Francisco’s Union Square, rocketed to fame on the “Sonny and Cher Show,” moved on to their own TV show, went to Vegas, won an Emmy and flamed out by the early 1980s. Before Robert Shields began following people around on the streets of San Francisco, he did his robot act in Los Angeles outside the Hollywood Wax Museum. He now lives in Sedona, Ariz., --where he creates jewelry for a chain of four stores called Robert Shields Design.

During the duo’s heyday, Shields, who studied with Marceau, spent a lot of time complaining about mime-bashing, but at the same time bashed Marceau’s traditions.

He quit Marceau’s school after 3 1/2 weeks because “everyone was wearing striped shirts and walking against the wind.” “I’m not a real fan of mime,” Shields has said. “I’m a clown, an eccentric dancer--everything Marcel Marceau wouldn’t do, I do.”

So who’s still walking against the wind to multiple standing ovations around the world at 79, and who’s selling bracelets in the Southwest? I’m only asking. The moral of the story is, have respect for mimes, and meems--for the mime can do anything, be anything, make anything out of nothing. But please, do it at least 3 feet away from me.