The San Francisco Mime Troupe Reader

1. The 1960s: Mime to Guerrilla Theater

1. The 1960s: Mime to Guerrilla Theater The San Francisco Mime Troupe was in the vanguard of the alternative theater movement in the United States, helping shape the Bay Area’s cultural life during the transition between the Beats of the 1950s and the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, when San Francisco was the “Athens of the counterculture .”1 Ronald Guy Davis founded the troupe in 1959, and within ‹ve years major features that still de‹ne the company had been established: its name, free shows touring in local parks, and a broad performance style drawn from easily accessible forms of popular theater. Major challenges faced by the troupe included grappling with the economics of free theater and creating a precedent for performing in public places. The major changes during the decade included company membership and the development of a radical political ideology. The troupe’s ‹rst decade corresponded to a time of explosive social and political change in the United States beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963. As the unof‹cial “theater of the movement,” troupe shows tackled the decade’s major issues, especially civil rights and the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating nonviolence in 1964, but over one hundred riots erupted in major American cities between 1965 and 1968 and King was assassinated on 4 April 1968. Youth rallied against the draft, and by the end of the decade Americans of all ages participated in massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Campuses were in revolt: the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall of 1964 and Columbia University ’s insurrection in the spring of 1968 toppled conventional notions of authority. 9 The Company R. G. Davis was twenty-four years old when he arrived in San Francisco in 1958. He had just completed a six-month Fulbright studying with mime artist Etienne Decroux in Paris. Although New York was then the undisputed heart of the American theater, Davis wanted the less commercial and more European cultural environment that San Francisco offered. Allen Ginsberg had de‹ned the beat generation, reading “Howl” at San Francisco ’s Six Gallery three years before; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder were also there. As part of this literary renaissance, San Francisco possessed at least one theater to compare with experimental companies in Europe such as the Royal Court in London and the Berliner Ensemble: the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop. The workshop had been created in 1951 by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, then professors at San Francisco State College, with director Alan Mandel. They introduced their small, elite audience to the work of writers such as Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett, making a place for themselves in Western theater history with their production of Waiting for Godot at San Quentin in 1957. Davis had heard about the workshop in Europe. He auditioned and was selected as an assistant director in 1958. Two years later, as the regional repertory movement gained momentum, a Ford Foundation grant permitted the workshop to expand into a resident equity company. The Kennedy administration made the arts fashionable, and in 1965 government support for the arts would be institutionalized with the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The proliferation and decentralization of professional theaters accelerated. When Blau and Irving accepted offers to manage Lincoln Center in 1965, several leading actors from the company followed them. The Actors’ Workshop struggled and then closed one year later, but was immediately succeeded by a bigger resident repertory company: American Conservatory Theatre. Shortly after he joined the Actors’ Workshop, Davis created his own ancillary project, the R. G. Davis Mime Troupe, with some of his students and workshop members. They premiered Mime and Words at the San Francisco Art Institute on 29 October 1959. The following year they performed at the Paci‹c Coast Arts Festival at Reed College, organized by Reed student and future troupe member Arthur Holden, at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and in the Actors’ Workshop’s Encore Theatre on Sunday nights at 11:00 P.M., the only time the stage was available. The Eleventh Hour Mime Show opened 11 December 1960. Although no admission was charged, contributions were encouraged. The ‹rst night an audience of 120 people contributed seventeen dollars. In January 1962, the troupe premiered The Dowry at the Encore and that summer returned theater to the open air with...