Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

As the character of the Soubrette finally stops the war between Spain and Italy (adisguised United States and Vietnam), she tells the audience, “If you want somethingdone my friends—do it yourselves” (Shank 60). In the midst of a farcical plot aboutsecret lovers and a man cross-dressing to avoid military service, the Mime Troupe urgesits audience to consider their own political power and individual responsibility forhelping to end the war.In 1962 the Mime Troupe began performing outdoors in Bay Area parks. Even asthey reached out to local workers, a “core audience of young intellectuals followed themwherever they played” (Shank 60). These students and young Leftists helped to make theMime Troupe very popular on Bay Area college campuses. Rubin evidently knew theMime Troupe’s Davis: in Do It! Rubin claims it was Davis who suggested he wear theRevolutionary War uniform to a 1966 House Un-American Activities Committee hearing(59). It is very likely that West coast Leftist activists Rubin and Albert experienced MimeTroupe performances in the mid-1960s when they were deeply involved in the Berkeleypolitical scene.Davis began developing the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s guerrilla theatretechniques in the early 1960s, as the company moved performances out of traditionalperformance spaces and into the parks and neighborhoods of San Francisco. Hearticulated his concept of guerrilla theatre in a manifesto published in TDR: TulaneDrama Review in 1966. Drawing on Marxist philosophy, Davis imagined a theatrecompany working as a cooperative, and focusing its craft on social and economic change.The company members would be artistic guerrillas, always keeping on the move in their166