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2. The 1970s: All Art Is Political During the 1970s the San Francisco Mime Troupe struggled to reinvent itself. Besides learning how to operate as a collective, they adapted their membership and outreach to re›ect a multicultural society. They created over twenty original productions in addition to Brecht’s The Mother and Dario Fo’s We Can’t Pay, We Won’t Pay, were awarded their second Obie, and made their ‹rst European tour. They bought a studio in the Mission District, still their home, and began an eight-year battle against the construction of an elite Performing Arts Center. Although the company started the decade at the top of its form with two back-to-back successes, later in the decade, during the Carter administration, the work was less successful. Nevertheless , Stewart McBride praised them in the Christian Science Monitor in 1980, saying they had lowered their “elephant gun on everything from urban renewal to in›ation, male chauvinism to big business, nuclear power to rough toiletpaper.”1 Although domestic issues dominated the troupe’s focus during the decade, their biggest, most successful productions focused on American policies abroad. Public protests against the war in Vietnam escalated as the United States invaded Laos and Cambodia and Lt. William Calley was sentenced to life for his role in the massacre at My Lai. The war did not end until 1975, and by then ‹fty thousand American soldiers had been killed in Southeast Asia. Watergate and the resignation of President Nixon in 1974 completed the collapse of public trust in the government. This loss of faith in traditional institutions prompted the emergence of identity politics on both the right and the left: Christian fundamentalists, feminists, environmentalists , American Indian activists, the farmworkers movement. President Carter’s greatest victory and defeat occurred in quick succession late in the decade: the Camp David accord that brought Egypt and Israel together 77 in 1978 was followed by the Iran hostage crisis. The decade ended with a near-disaster at Three Mile Island reminding the public of the potential devastation in the con›ict between business and the natural world. The Company The San Francisco Mime Troupe’s transition into a collective at the end of 1969 was, in Joan Holden’s view, inevitable.2 As the group’s political ideology evolved during the 1960s and the plays increasingly advocated social change, the organizational structure had to change as well. During the ‹rst decade the company had employed various degrees of collaboration in the creation of productions (The Dowry and A Minstrel Show in particular were collaborative efforts), and had attempted systems of shared artistic governance twice, in 1968 and 1969. However, once the troupe chose to become a collective, that structure informed everything they did: administrative operation , the creation of productions, relationships with the public, and, as an expression of politics, the subject matter of plays. The idea of reorganizing as a collective had been planted in 1969 while the troupe worked on the production of Brecht’s Congress of Whitewashers by studying Marx’s theory of common ownership of the means of production . Robert Scheer notes the irony in Davis’s helping “the company to take seriously the ideas of Marx and the Chinese Revolution, while still seeking to maintain his individual prerogatives. It could not hold.”3 However, when Davis left, the troupe ‹rst reverted to traditional structures. According to Joan Holden, “Sandy Archer, who was second in command to Davis—this was typical of how we weren’t moving collectively—automatically became the director. But she wasn’t ready to assume the burden of being ‘the genius’ of the company. . . . when she left [with Saul Landau in 1971], we had to face the idea that we were going on without ‘geniuses.’”4 A great mystique seems to have grown around Davis’s departure, and much has been written about it, but Arthur Holden described the process simply: “The break was pretty much of an ideological one, having to do with how you organize a group of people for artistic enterprises. . . . Obviously Ronnie having been the boss, he was on that side; and all of the others of us were the workers. It was pretty straightforward.”5 In the documentary Troupers (1985), Joan Holden says “There were three years of ‹ghting between the company and Ronny, and they were really about authority and control. . . . Most of us didn’t want Ronny to go, but we just wanted to have more to say...

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