Billy The Mime at Sacred Fools
angeleno, overnighter The Overnighter
October 19th, 2005
Heliotrope, after sunset. Alone at a table outside. Sitting and waiting, drinking nothing, doing nothing. Snug in a wool scarf, dangling. Water pipes in the display window, a lot of them; a lot of coffee and emptiness inside. The barista decides screw it and takes the opposing table outside, to smoke a Marlboro Light and read a few more pages.
He takes peeks at her and she at him, and neither says anything. For minutes, for minutes more, for half an hour. They sit there, two feet apart, silently, a tangle of psy-op pantomime.
~~~
Mime. The art flourishes where there is quiet cafe culture and empty pockets; it withers where culture goes boom and yellow and retail. The artistry of mime has a fragile, music box quality known to those who stay hungry, who look more in than out; itís this fragility that distances the art of the mime from most Americans, who generally like big, shiny, noisy, explosive things, and who think of mimes as frivolous, feminine, French. In a society built on spectacle and the literal and things for sale, the humble, silent, often abstract world of the mime artistry is lost. It only exists to cafe culture, to quiet people who know daily life.
~~~
I once said to a friend that my favorite film of all time was Marcel Carneís Children of Paradise, and the friend didnít talk to me for two years. I’m one of those hapless American souls for whom movies can exist without explosions and music is often best when you can barely hear it, for whom hours contemplating the arcane are days well spent. So I’m naturally vulnerable to mimes even if most friends and lovers are not.
I’m not so much for the mimes that accost you on the street in a busy commercial district or who escort you to the correct room at a publisher’s party. I’m for mimes standing on stage, alone, with little beyond themselves to work with, as God and Batiste intended. And last night I saw Billy the Mime perform at Sacred Fools, saw him for the first time, and I was put in touch again with why the art of the mime is so precious when you see it, and also so lost when the show is over.
Some of you may know Billy the Mime for stealing an abundantly tough-to-pilfer show in The Aristocrats, the documentary about the telling and telling and telling of one of the world’s best-known lewd jokes. But I hope you give yourself the opportunity to see him live on a stage.
As a classically-trained mime artist with a dream pedigree, Billy’s motions, even when they are at their most profane (and they often are) are straight out of mime’s most classic tradition. But where he breaks all previous boundaries is in his skit selection. With skits like JFK Jr. We Hardly Knew Ye and A Day Called 9/11 (early on, a terrorist pauses on the plane to adjust the air on his seat, for greater comfort) many in the audience are uncertain if they should reward some little recognized detail with laughter or gasps (a gentleman sitting behind me had no problem with the distinction, laughing at the eveningís most harrowing moments). If you thought The Aristocrats performance pushed the mime-envelope for possibility, you haven’t yet seen A Night in San Francisco: 1979.
Nor have you likely seen mime incorporating such literacy. Half the joy of watching Billyís fluid body and gestures is to discover what is iconic about the subject, and watching the iconic given a literate wheeze. I donít want to spoil the surprise of these, but Iíll give an example: a skit that ends in a lynching takes a page out of the hanging in Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge. In my own favorite piece, Thomas & Sally - a Night at Monticello, a prim and proper Jefferson, face full of genius, works a bottle of wine in a restrained but sensuous way that speaks to his complex sexual hypocrisy; the way heunbuttons himself alone is devastating to both our own ideas of Jefferson and Jefferson’s legacy alike.
In a typical night of Billy (he selects from a couple dozen skits in pocket) lot of buttons come undone and zippers get unzipped, but all in the exquisite movement that we expect to see in classic mime. The show isn’t for the easily offended, but then again, what is? Certainly retail culture, on-screen explosions, chatting up the barista when she’s trying to steal a private cafe moment is far more profane. The victims in most Billy skits come away with all the sympathy, so much so that the evening can feel at times as much morality play as pantomime.
Billy the Mime (click for reservations) runs at Sacred Fools Theater, 660 N. Heliotrope (just south of Melrose, a couple blocks west of Vermont) on November 1, 8, 15, and 22. And this Sunday, October 23, Billy goes off Broadway to Producer’s Club II, 616 Ninth Avenue (between 43rd and 44th). Call 310-281-8337 for the LA shows and 212-502-3536 for the Manhattan evening.