R.G. Davis founded the company that subsequently became the San Francisco Mime Troupe, now celebrating its 50th Anniversary. The Tony Award-winning company’s current free offering, “Too Big to Fail” can be seen at Bay Area locations throughout the summer and fall. Davis tells us about the importance of education, the ongoing inspiration he gets from playwright Bertolt Brecht and what he’d do if he was president for a day.
Who has left the biggest impression on you as you’ve gone through life? Bertolt Brecht and epic/dialectical theatre.
To whom do you turn in times of darkness? First the battery to my solar panel, then the bulb, and finally Brecht, Marx, Lenin, Slavoj Zizek and growing food.
Biggest compliment you’ve ever been paid? You have passed your Ph.D. at 75, now publish that dissertation “Ecological Aesthetics.”
What is the best way for solving arguments in your personal life? Call a lawyer, or hang up the phone, take a sauna and begin again.
Given your background, would you agree or disagree that actions speak louder than words? Actions and words are usually united and contradictory making the two dialectical. In this culture we assume silence is true, when often the silent ones are empty minded. Intellectual understanding would help social debate. Actions can be as deceptive as false statements by bankers and real estate brokers.
The president has asked you to fill in for the day. First order of business? Shrink wrap the empire, cut the U.S. military budget of $700 billion in half, arrange to reduce the military bases and U.S. imperial wars around the globe, all by [noon]. After lunch, give the money to single-payer health care and educational grants for all grades to study ecological sciences, nationalize the banks, and by late afternoon tea, expand Michelle’s organic garden to the front lawn.
What is the best part of your craft? Seeing it develop much better and be more effective then what we thought it would be while addressing a substantive subject.
If you could change one thing about human nature, what would it be? It requires a set of multiple factors, since human nature is shaped by political-economic conditions. Replacing junk entertainment and consumerism with ecological cultural sensibility, and useful work, thereby closing the gap between humans and human habitat and nature, the wild part as well.
What do you hope is your lasting legacy on the world? It is an essential ecological socialist function of humanity to prevent polluting, poisoning, bombing, attacking, radiating — secretly or publicly — in order to exploit resources and humans.
