OBIT
Sandra Archer, Mime Troupe actress in '60s, dies
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/13/BAVJ1FULH2.DTL
Robert Hurwitt
November 14, 2010
Sandra Archer, a mesmerizing actress whose brief career left a large
impression on Bay Area theater artists, died Oct. 12 at Bayview Villa
hospice in San Carlos. A lead performer with the San Francisco Mime
Troupe in the 1960s, she made an indelible impression on audiences
and fellow actors with her beauty, forceful stage presence and
impeccable comic and dramatic timing, before she quit the stage in 1970.
Ms. Archer was diagnosed with cancer in 2007, which went into
remission after treatment. "It came back with a vengeance" last
winter, said her close friend Sally Forsberg-Weber. She was 72.
"Sandy Archer was simply the most luminous, gifted, brilliant actress
I have ever worked with," said actor Peter Coyote by e-mail from
Madrid. "I loved her madly, and unrequitedly, and to this day my
heart quickens to think of her. Her loss hits me like a punch in the gut."
"Her voice was superb," said Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis, with
whom she lived in the '60s. "Her talent was enormous. She
unhesitatingly knew what she was doing onstage and she could handle
any level of work. Whatever she did, she really did it. People said
she was a genius. I can't deny it."
Sandra Lee Archer was born Feb. 23, 1938, in San Francisco and
graduated from San Rafael High School at the age of 16, said Linda
Jenkins, her cousin and closest surviving family member. She
graduated from San Francisco State College, where she studied
theater, and was briefly married, Jenkins said.
Ms. Archer performed with the Mime Troupe from 1964 to 1970. She
excelled in commedia dell'arte, outdoors in the parks, and in more
serious works by Sartre, García Lorca and Brecht.
"She took command of the stage," said Joe Bellan, a leading Bay Area
comic actor. "She was more than a hard act to follow. Sandy was an
impossible act to follow."
Ms. Archer left the Mime Troupe during the conflicts that accompanied
its transition to a collective leadership. She participated in
setting up a short-lived Cultural Training Center, then, with Bellan,
co-founded Tale Spinners, a multi-generational company that took
shows to senior centers and drew performers from them.
"Tale Spinners was close to her heart," said Bellan, who visited her
shortly before her death. She coordinated the company's work but
never performed with it, he said. After a few years, she left the Bay
Area for Westwood in Lassen County to care for her aging parents.
"She just dropped out," Bellan said. "I think she burned out. She was
just doing too much."
Ms. Archer lived in Westwood until her death. She worked for the
nonprofit Plumas Rural Services in Quincy, retiring in 2001. She also
taught children's theater there and, in the '80s, traveled to
Humboldt County to teach classes and direct students at Dell'Arte,
one of the nation's leading schools for physical comedy.
Holden, the Mime Troupe's primary playwright for three decades, said
Ms. Archer "gave me the greatest playwriting lesson I ever got,"
simply by demanding, "Don't give me feelings. Give me verbs."
Holden said Ms. Archer will be remembered for "her beauty, her warmth
onstage, her range and the risks she could take with her timing.
Whatever is the comic equivalent of perfect pitch, she had it."
A Facebook page has been set up in her honor at
www.facebook.com/pages/Sandy-Archer.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sandy-Archer
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E-mail Robert Hurwitt at rhurw...@sfchronicle.com.
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