E-CIBS notes the death on 21 June 2026 of RG Davis, a key disseminator of Brechtian ideas in the USA as the founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and of Epic West at UC Berkeley. An obituary article about Davis by Lily Janiak in the San Francisco Chronicle can be found here.

For readers interested in Davis’s broader historical significance, Michael William Doyle’s essay “Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965–1968” situates Davis and the San Francisco Mime Troupe within the emergence of guerrilla theater and countercultural performance politics. The Ronald Guy Davis Papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society provides an overview of archival materials documenting Davis’s artistic development, writings, and work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and related radical theater organizations. And the podcast below contains an interview with Davis offering a wide-ranging reflection on his life in art and politics, including the Mime Troupe’s beginnings, civil rights, and his later work on Brechtian ecology.

The image of Davis above is a still from an interview conducted in 2013 by missionlocal.org, a project of the UC Berkeley School of Journalism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EkGM51gRIg).