If for years you’ve thought of the San Francisco Mime Troupe as purveyors of satire — comic attacks that make the powerful look ridiculous — that category might be inaccurate. Or at least incomplete.

Sure, the Troupers still claim the label to a degree, and some satire does open “Breakdown — A New Musical,” this year’s outdoor touring summer show that, per tradition, opened on Independence Day in Dolores Park. Marcia Stone (played by Jamella Cross, a welcome, luster-voiced Troupe newcomer) is a Fox News reporter looking for headlines about San Francisco that will confirm her audiences’ stereotypes: “A filthy city of filth”? “Ass of the Pacific”? “A city where communist drag queens rule”?

At that last one, the opening-day crowd roared their approval. Here, in going just a notch or two beyond the already sensationalized right-wing coverage of the real world, playwrights Michael Gene Sullivan and Marie Cartier do the Lord’s work of satire: exposing the vices and frailties of those with money and clout, knocking them down a peg and prodding us to imagine and perhaps enact a world where we might do the same.

But a more precise genre for “Breakdown,” and for much of the Troupe’s work in recent years, might be a more obscure one: the medieval morality play.

If you never took a theater history class or haven’t dusted off your college textbooks in a while, here’s a quick primer. This art form, popular for centuries, shares many characteristics with the Mime Troupe’s mode. Both are defined by Manichaean good vs. evil, either God and virtue vs. the devil and sin or, in the Mime Troupe’s case, socialism and progressivism vs. capitalism and conservatism.

Both also use characters as symbols. In the medieval morality play “Everyman,” for instance, characters have names like Goods (for the title character’s worldly possessions), Death, Discretion and Fellowship. In “Breakdown,” characters are stand-ins for rungs on the socioeconomic ladder: Yume (Kina Kantor) is an unhoused person with mental illness; Saidia (Alicia M.P. Nelson) is an overworked social worker; Brad (Jed Pasario) is a Fox News producer who sexually harasses until Rupert Murdoch (Andre Amarotico) enters the room, rendering him an ass-kissing crybaby.

Both media dramatize the temptation to stray from the path of righteousness and have foregone conclusions. In “Breakdown,” the plot moves toward getting a social worker — not the false promises and idols of capitalism — to listen to and help the unhoused. That’s it. As in morality plays, it’s as if the show is saying, “See? Good things happen when you adhere to our ideology.”

我是一个frequent Mime Troupe criticover the years, and reconsidering its work through the lens of morality plays helps me understand my disconnect. Much as I wish I could take up the banner of the Tony Award-winning, 64-year-old group’s cause, and as much as I sympathize with its politics, when I watch the shows each year, I feel like I’m at a church pageant for a religion I don’t belong to. It’s as if it’s not supposed to be good theater; it’s supposed to be moral instruction that even a child could understand.

I talked about my misgivings with my graduate school adviser Joel Schechter, a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University. He’s the author of a 2021 book called “Satire” and a onetime Mime Troupe board member until he resigned in 2015 “in protest,” as he put it.

“If it’s going to be political satire, it needs to direct its ridicule not simply at stick figures,” he said. “What I’m calling for is complexity that includes representations of wealth and power that are not simply straw men or straw women.”

Historically, satire could be downright dangerous, he added. For instance, in ancient Greece, the playwright Aristophanes might make fun of a leader who was sitting right there in an audience. In that brief moment, Schechter said, “The artists take control of society. It’s a world that they make or remake for a few hours. That’s an important quality of satire.”

I also talked to Oakland stand-up comedian and CNN’s “United Shades of America” host W. Kamau Bell about how political comedy works. Bell, who got his TV start with “Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell” where he riffed on current events, emphasized that he’s no expert on the Mime Troupe, but he referenced the concept of “clapter,” which he credited to the late-night host and “Saturday Night Live” alum Seth Meyers.

“It’s the idea of people just clapping at the end of your jokes, because they agree, and not really laughing,” he said. “If it’s just sort of polite golf claps after everything you say, that’s not fun. … That is the invitation of comedy: If you’re not transgressing in some way, then you’re not actually in a deep well of humor.”

So if a comedy gets only polite golf claps, and it ceases to be comedy, what does it become instead?

“Closer to a rally,” he offered.

这可能是另一种堤防e “Breakdown” and other Mime Troupe work. If you’re already converted, it might fire you up and reconfirm your convictions. If you’re not already on the road to righteousness — if, like some characters in the play, you work for a for-profit corporation, or fail to aid every needy soul you encounter, or sell people things they don’t need — you might already be too far gone down the road to evil, and this rally can’t save you.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com