Joan Holden’s daughter, Sophie Chumley, remembers a burly man trying to steal her mother’s purse at 24th and Bryant when she and her little sister were children. The man dragged her mother, still clutching her purse, across the street — but Holden defied him.
“We were freaking out, but she was really mad, and she was calling the guy every name in the book, and kicking him with her big heavy clogs until some dudes came and helped her,” Sophie Chumley recalled. “She was not afraid at all.”
Holden, a playwright for the San Francisco Mime Troupe from 1967 to 2000, died of cancer on Jan. 19, one day after her 85th birthday.
For more than 30 years, her leftist political ideals, thirst for social justice and witty style of writing produced work that took the San Francisco Mime Troupe from a guerrilla theater company to an award-winning collective: The group won a 1987 Tony award for excellence in regional theater, and two Obies for “The Dragon’s Lady Revenge” (1974) and “Seeing Double” (1990).
Her daughter’s recollection of the attempted purse-snatching was not the only memory of Holden’s ferocity. The playwright’s former longtime partner, Dan Chumley, remembered a separate incident in which Holden was walking down Mission Street and saw another large fellow walking toward them and yelling, “Bitch, fucking bitches, fucking bitches.”
Holden stood still right in front of the man, looked into his eyes and said, “Fuck you, prick.”
“The guy grabs her by her shoulder and neck and lifts her up off the ground,” he said. “So I’m basically standing there going, ‘Puuu, puu, put her down, put her down,’ and he’s shaking her and he says, ‘What did you say?’ And she says, ‘You fucking prick.’” The man acted as though he’d been smacked in the head — and promptly set her down.
Born in 1939, Holden grew up in a leftist household in Berkeley, and got a bachelor’s degree in literature from Reed College in 1960. She then joined the English graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, and within a few years began at the theater that would define her life.
Mission Local collected memories from friends and family who knew Holden well. All emphasized her love and dedication to the Mission District.
Joan the teacher
“She was a fantastic, open and available teacher,” said Amos Glick, an actor with the Mime Troupe for 17 years, including Holden’s last 10 years with the collective.
Glick remembers reading about the troupe in the late ’80s while living in Massachusetts and being fascinated by its work. Within weeks of moving to San Francisco in 1990, he joined its ranks. He started taking acting classes with Holden — lessons, he said, that always ended with a writing session.
Holden’s presence was impossible for her students to ignore, he said.
“She had this kind of high-status presence in the room, but no matter how new or green you were, she would listen,” said Glick. “She was able to gracefully take you under her wing.”
Glick remembers Holden as a tough woman who would calmly defend her arguments. He described her as quick, smart, well-read, well-educated — and kind.
“Once I saw one of her notepads, and I saw very clearly that she had written ‘Amos — he’s a happy actor,’” said Glick. And, seeing that, he was. “So happy,” he said.
Joan the mom
Sophie Chumley
Sophie Chumley, the middle of Holden’s three daughters with Dan Chumley, said her mom loved all different types of people, listening to their stories and bringing them forward.
“She would sometimes check into a room to have more space for writing,” Chumley said. “One time, while staying at a hotel in the Tenderloin, an old man approached her and asked ‘Hey, why don’t you write a play about me? I fought in the Spanish Civil War.’”
That was the genesis of the Mime Troupe’s 1986 production “Spain ‘36.”
Kate Chumley
Holden’s oldest daughter, Kate Chumley, said she always knew she had a mom who had the will to make things happen in the world. She remembers her as a person who was curious about people, and had a natural ability to take people as they were. She had compassion and patience for everyone’s stories, and listened to ideas that made her characters more vivid and human.
“She was ruled by her passion for engaging with the world as it is, explaining it and turning it into art that could make a difference.”
Lily Chumley
The youngest of Holden’s three daughters, Lily, recalled how her mother loved the bus. Her favorite route? Taking the 27-Bryant downtown. It included a convenient combination of two things she loved: A little walk to the bus stop, and a good bus ride on Bryant Street.
Chumley said that, even on days when her mother was sick, she would still say how sad she was that she couldn’t ride the bus. Chumley recalled an occasion when her mom, already in her 80s, was attacked by a mentally unstable person while she waited at a bus stop in downtown San Francisco.
“It was pretty bad … she had a black eye. But she was back in the bus that same week,” said Lily Chumley.
Joan the mentor
Rotimi Agbabiaka, a lecturer at Stanford University and a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe since 2014, recalled the first time he met Holden: She was small, and yet “she had such a penetrating gaze, and such a direct and powerful way of speaking and expressing herself,” he said. “There was definitely a big presence and big energy she brought in with her, and I remember being quite struck by that.”
Though Oluwashola joined the troupe 10 years after Holden stepped down as its main playwright, he said the retired playwright would still come community feedback sessions and backyard previews to participate and observe.
Oluwashola wrote his first and only play for the troupe, “Seeing Red,” in 2018, with Holden coaching him throughout.
“It meant the world to me,” said Oluwashola of her mentorship. “When I think of the process and the experience and dedication, commitment and relentlessness with which Joan approached writing — I learned so much from that.”
He remembered Holden as a playwright who created work that would speak to regular folks in a language they understood.
Joan the grandma
For Lulu Perez, 25, Holden was a “big powerful artist and activist,” but also “just my grandma,” the woman who taught Perez “how to cook … how to think, how to write, how to clean the house, how to shop and how to travel.”
“So much of who I am is because of her,” she said. Her grandparents were a second set of parents who lived nearby, and she saw them often. She remembered days at Holden’s house in Bernal Heights, standing at the kitchen counter and helping her grandma cook. Holden would then bathe her, tuck her in and read her a bedtime story.
“I feel like I was born at the right time in her life where she still had all the energy to be a grandma,” said Perez.
Joan the partner
“Think about what the pillow talk would be like between a playwright and a director,” said Dan Chumley, recalling his partnership — and work — with Holden. He was the principal director for most of his 36 years with the troupe, from 1967 to 2003. He was also Holden’s partner from 1969 to 2001. He said the relationship between director and playwright was not alway easy, because it felt as if the characters and the plays she created were alive. They would sometimes argue about changes in the scripts, and all the tension accumulated at work would, at times, come home with them.
Chumley said there were many things that made him fall in love with Holden. He said she would often know what she wanted even before she knew herself, as if she was making moves on a chessboard.
And he admired Holden’s sense of adventure.
“I loved her power. We did crazy things. I’d drive a motorcycle across the country and we’d go to Los Angeles and decide to come up on the Carrizo Plain, a road that goes to 108 degrees regularly. I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking, but she was brave like that, [to] get on the back of a motorcycle with a crazy person like me,” said Chumley.
Joan the friend and colleague
Andrea Snow met Holden when she joined the troupe in 1970 as an actress, writer and composer. During those years, Holden was generous, welcoming and funny, Snow said.
“She didn’t have any ownership of anything. She really welcomed everybody’s contribution and listened to everybody,” said Snow. “It was wonderful to work with somebody who had that kind of authority about play structure, and it was wonderful to see the speeches she created, because her word choices were really great. She was funny and she wrote funny.”
Snow left the troupe in 1981, but she maintained a friendship with her former colleague, one that grew closer in the last 15 years.
Holden, she said, was as strong a friend as she had been a mentor.
“She actually kept track of me as a person, and she had a pretty good idea of who I was. It was sweet to see that she knew me,” said Snow.
Ellen Callas, the general manager of the Mime Troupe, said Holden was encouraging when she first joined the group in 1986. Callas had the opportunity to tour with Holden to places like Nepal and Hong Kong, and collaborate with writers in those countries. That experience, she said, taught her how easy it was for Holden to bring people together.
In one instance, Holden brought together a Jewish man and a Palestinian woman to write the award-winning play “Seeing Double.” The piece fictionalizes two California men, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who go to Israel to claim land they both believe belongs to them. En route, their plane crashes following a hijacking by the Smokers Liberation Lobby and both wind up in enemy camps, the Jew in a Palestinian camp and the Palestinian in an Israeli camp. The New York Times called the play “so evenhanded in its criticism as to offend extremists on both sides.”
Callas recalled that Holden refused to use a computer for a long time, as she was not a tech-savvy person, and that she brought a typewriter for a long time that she had since college.
“It was entertaining, to say the least,” said Callas.
Joan the sister
During his elegy at Fernwood Cemetary in Mill Valley, Stuart Allan, Holden’s brother, remembered the home where he and his sister, Joan Holden, grew up. It was in the Berkeley Hills with “spectacular panoramic views” of the bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais. He recalled his sister being alive to nature and joining the Sierra Club with other girls in the neighborhood.
“Joan joined them, from an early age, on long family hiking trips in the High Sierra, a burro carrying the heavier gear. Later, she organized two-week group ‘High Trips,’ with mule trains. The High Country was our dramatic boundary, looming large in our understanding of the world,” Allan wrote in the elegy.
“Half a century later, our mother recalled Joan’s earliest political declaration: The 5-year-old Joan greeting an arriving dinner guest with this question: ‘Isn’t Hitler terrible??’”
Thank you, a beautiful tribute to Joan.