Ronald Guy Davis, the founder and director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. He began his professional career as the teenaged band leader of “Ronny Davis and his Orchestra.” After receiving a B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1955, he studied modern dance with Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, and Martha Graham. He also acted at the Herbert Berghoff Studios and performed with the American Mime Theatre from 1955 to 1957. Davis was so impressed by a Marcel Marceau performance, that in 1957 he applied for and received a Fulbright grant to study under Marceau's teacher Etienne Decroux at the Ecole de Mime in Paris. On returning to the U.S. in 1958, Davis settled in San Francisco, a city he considered culturally more attractive than New York; there he performed his own mimes and taught mime. In the summers of 1958 and 1959, he also taught mime at the Perry-Mansfield School in Colorado.
In 1959 he began to perform with and act as assistant director for the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, a professional repertory company, within which he organized the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe. Following a dispute with the Workshop's administrators over the artist's political obligations, Davis and the mime troupe broke away from the Workshop in 1962 and adopted the title of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which coined the term “guerrilla theatre,” was one of the first American radical theatres. Its productions (“committed to change, not Art”) satirized the Establishment, sex, civil rights, and the military through performances that ranged from commedia dell'arte to happenings to free shows in San Francisco's public parks. The troupe was supported by donations requested after park shows and by fees received on university and college tours. As part of their increasing political involvement, in 1966, Davis and the San Francisco Mime Troupe were responsible for founding the Artists' Liberation Front (ALF) and the Radical Booking Agency. The ALF was intended to organize San Francisco's artists into a federation or co-op controlled by member artists for the defense of their artistic endeavors against censorship, “to stop cultural blight and rip-off.” The Radical Booking Agency, 1966-1968, provided non-union theatrical groups like the mime troupe and the FUGs, a rock singing group, with a non-union, non-commercial booking agency.
Following problems within the organization, Davis left the Mime Troupe in 1970 to found a Marxist theater department at Columbia College in Chicago. He soon returned to San Francisco to work for Praxis, an organization he considered politically more effective. Since then Davis has opened Epic West, a center for the study of Bertolt Brecht in Berkeley, California, and the Cultural Training Center in San Francisco. He has also written a book, The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years (1975) and has other writing projects in preparation.
Since Davis's departure in 1970, the San Francisco Mime Troupe has become a multi-racial collective of about 18 members. The troupe still performs in San Francisco parks as well as touring the country. Although it still relies heavily on mime technique and improvisation in preparing shows, it has done fewer commedia dell'arte plays and has concentrated on more overtly political plays. The troupe has toured Europe twice; and in 1980 was the first American theater group invited to tour Cuba by the Cuban minister of culture. Notable productions since 1970 include The Dragon Lady's Revenge (for which the troupe won an Obie Award in 1973), False Promises, By Popular Demand, and Americans or The Last Tango in Huahuatenango, all written by members of the troupe, The Mother by Bertolt Brecht, and We Can't Pay; We Won't Pay by Dario Fo.
