In 1966, when a Harvard student approached Ronald G. Davis — the founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, renowned for its scathing street-theater satires of all things Establishment — about tuning in, turning on and dropping out of college to join the troupe, Mr. Davis cautioned him.
Dropping out, Mr. Davis said dismissively, was “for pop stars, and they don’t drop out, they plug in and sell out,” the onetime student, Charles Degelman, recalled in a recent essay on Substack.
“Turning on is irrelevant,” Mr. Davis added. “Get high, don’t get high, I don’t care, just be on time, know why you’re here, and don’t forget the ammunition.”
Mr. Davis died on June 21 at his home in San Francisco, his son, Colin Davis, said. He was 92.
The “ammunition” may have been figurative, but Mr. Davis’s eagerness to train the cross hairs on American bourgeois culture was quite real.
Rising to prominence in the era when San Francisco was the hippie capital of the West, if not the world, the troupe under Mr. Davis, who professionally went by R.G. Davis, carved out a place in counterculture lore. They mounted agitprop theatrical events, usually in city parks, that fired endless salvos over the Vietnam War, racism, economic inequality and middle-class complacency — sometimes putting its members at legal risk.
As Mr. Davis, who served as the troupe’s artistic director from its founding in 1959 until 1970, told Mr. Degelman, who ended up joining as an actor and musician: “We commit. We engage. We breathe the fresh air of the parks and put on free shows. We create the path of most resistance. We fight the system.”
Despite its ragtag, do-it-yourself ethos, the group featured no shortage of future notables, among them Peter Coyote, later an Emmy-winning actor; Luis Valdez, the founder of the influential Mexican American theater company El Teatro Campesino who also directed the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic “La Bamba”; Steve Reich, the Minimalist composer; and Saul Landau, the left-wing documentary filmmaker.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe eventually gave birth to the Diggers, a community action group that Mr. Coyote helped found, which offered free food, clothes and medical care to the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury scene.
Bill Graham, who became a powerhouse rock promoter, began his career as the troupe’s business manager, organizing benefits that featured acid-rock royalty like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Mr. Davis had studied in Paris under Étienne Decroux, who was one of Marcel Marceau’s key teachers and was known as the father of modern French mime — or “meem,” as Mr. Davis called it, observing the French pronunciation. But under Mr. Davis, the San Francisco troupe veered from tradition early on; it freely used dialogue and blended the avant-garde theatricality of Bertolt Brecht with the provocateur sensibility of Lenny Bruce.
The result was a sharply political form of commedia dell’arte, the centuries-old Italian theatrical form known for its masks, broad comedic stylings and earthy humor.
In August 1965, the troupe mounted the first of several planned performances of its bawdy reinterpretation of Giordano Bruno’s 16th-century Italian farce “Il Candelaio” (“The Candlemaker”) in Golden Gate Park. Hearing about the show’s risqué lampoon of contemporary sexual mores, the city’s Recreation and Parks Department leadership, deeming the production a “vulgar travesty,” convened to revoke the permit allowing the troupe to perform in parks.
Mr. Davis proceeded to mount another performance, in Lafayette Park. Before beginning, he slipped on his mask and addressed the crowd: “Today, for your appreciation, we perform an arrest,” the site FoundSF recounted.
And they did.
When Mr. Davis was sentenced to a year’s probation for performing in a park without a permit, he protested: “I don’t think the issue of free speech was considered. This is like an Iron Curtain country!”
He created a far bigger furor with the searing 1965 work “A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” by Gary Davis and Mr. Landau. A satire of old-time minstrel shows, it featured white characters in blackface. The point, R.G. Davis recalled in his 1975 book, “The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First 10 Years,” was to “get right into the problem of racism — ours and everyone else’s — by unearthing those stereotypes, clichés, cornballs and all that Uncle Tom jive.”
On a national tour with the piece, the group encountered protests and more arrests. To Mr. Davis, legal troubles were just part of the overall mission to destabilize the power structure.
“The minstrel show,” he wrote, “upchucked the unmelted pieces from the melting pot.”
Ronald Guy Davis, the youngest of three boys, was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1933. His father, Herman Davis, owned a factory that made children’s underwear, and his mother was Shirley (Gerst) Davis.
At the University of New Mexico, he received a bachelor’s degree in economics and also pursued an extracurricular interest in modern dance. After graduating in 1955, he moved to New York, and his study of dance eventually sparked his interest in mime. On a Fulbright scholarship, he studied it in Paris.
By the end of the 1950s, he had settled in San Francisco and was an assistant director at the Actor’s Workshop. The company was “progressive, liberal,” he recalled in a 2022 appearance on the podcast of Cosmonaut, a Marxist magazine. Even so, he felt “constricted,” and peeled off to pursue a more aggressively political vision.
In his 1966 manifesto, “Guerrilla Theater,” he wrote that he decided to “go where the people are — street corners, vacant lots or parks.”
As the 1970s approached, Mr. Davis found himself increasingly at odds with the other members of the troupe, many of whom were two decades his junior and, he said, had begun to focus more on identity politics than what he perceived as larger societal and economic issues.
As other members began to lobby to replace Mr. Davis’s authority as leader with a collective approach to decision-making, he left the troupe in 1970. The group has continued to evolve over the decades, winning a Regional Theater Tony Award and multiple Obie Awards along the way.
After his departure, Mr. Davis founded a Marxist theater department at Columbia College in Chicago, and later started Epic West, a center for the study of Brecht in Berkeley, Calif. Dismayed by the shifting cultural tides of the Reagan years, he turned his attention to environmental advocacy, studying at multiple universities as he sought to marry far-left politics with environmentalism. In his 70s, he earned a doctorate in ecological aesthetics from the University of California, Davis.
His three marriages — to Sally Alvord, Judy North and Robin Acker — ended in divorce. Besides his son, from his third marriage, Mr. Davis leaves no immediate survivors.
However sharp-edged his approach to theater, Mr. Davis’s vision for the mime troupe required a delicate balance.
“If the content is too immediate, the art is newsworthy and, like today’s newspaper, will line tomorrow’s garbage pail,” he wrote in his manifesto. “If the content is devious, symbolic or academically suggestive, the public will refuse to see it, because their minds have been flatted by television and dull jobs.
“To be stupid,” he added, “is a luxury only the commercial can afford.”
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