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

pig, they undercut the gravity of the political system and the authority of the ChicagoPolice Department, especially when officers scrambled about trying to catch Pigasus. TheYippies even used a traditional performative form—that of the press conference—toallow for broad audience appeal. It certainly worked, for it drew a crowd of journalists,and soon the story of Pigasus was spreading over the wires to a national audience ofnewspaper and magazine readers.One point on which the Yippies digressed from Davis’s original concept ofguerrilla theatre was the nomination of a Presidential candidate: a very immediate andnewsworthy act in a city preparing for a large political convention with the mediaexpecting many more stories to come. In his guerrilla theatre manifestos Davis revealshimself as a committed Marxist who explains his “own theatrical premise” with thestatement “Western society is rotten in general, capitalist society in the main, and U. S.society in the particular” (“Guerrilla Theatre: The Life Style” 29). For Davis, revolutionwas a serious life commitment, not a flash-in-the-pan event. After all, he conceived ofguerrilla theatre not just as a performance form, but as a “life style.” As I argued inChapter Two, the Yippies also agreed that their political and cultural activities constituteda lifestyle. But at the same time, they were all too willing to use guerrilla theatre tacticsnot for Davis’s imagined Marxist economic and social revolution, but rather for playingwith the media. Davis warns against using too immediate a subject matter for guerrillatheatre as it will soon be forgotten by the next story, the next thing to grab the media’sattention. But grabbing the media’s attention was what the Yippies were all about. 1960shistorian Michael William Doyle writes that “the Yippies’ version of guerrilla theater,170