Unearthed: Foundational ‘guerrilla theater’ statement by PETER BERG–and the script for his SF Mime Troupe play ‘Centerman’ (Underground, Oct. 5, 1966)

This PDF of a 12-page, little known periodical from 60 years ago came across the transom last week courtesy of the D.C. Public Library, and, honestly, I’m still struggling to come to an accurate understanding of its significance. Here’s the PDF:

Underground-1966_10_05Download

And here’s what we know for sure:

  1. Underground was a short-lived periodical published on a biweekly basis in the Washington, D.C. area from October, 1966 into 1967. For background on Underground, see Independent Press in D.C. and Virginia: An Underground History by Dale Brumfield.
  2. The opening text on ‘guerrilla theater’ is by Peter Berg, who at this point was a member of both the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers. A version of this text would later be published in the all-Diggers issue of The Realist, published in August,1968.
  3. Mime Troupe director R.G. ‘Ronnie’ Davis wrote an essay on ‘guerrilla theater’ that was published in the Summer, 1966 issue of the Tulane Drama Review, presumably predating this issue of Underground. In that essay, Davis credited Berg with coining the term ‘guerrilla theater.’ The Davis TDR text is generally acknowledged as the first published use of the term and the first formulation of the group performance tactic’s guiding principles.
  4. Regarding the script for ‘Centerman,’ printed in this issue of Underground: This appears to be the play’s first, and only, publication anywhere. In his introduction, Berg writes: “Centerman (using the theme of a short story by Wolfgang Borchert) was developed at the San Francisco Mime Troupe as actional pieces for guerrilla theater. It was first used during the [Oct. 15-16, 1965] International Days of Protest rally sponsored by the Vietnam Day Committee at San Francisco State College.”

In my 2006 interview with Berg, he said:

[W]e knew this new culture was there, we knew this phenomenon was occurring, centered in the Haight-Ashbury… [W]e dramaturges sat together and tried to think it out. What is this, in terms of breaking down the fourth wall? How is this a historical follow-through for Antonin Artaud on one hand and Bertrolt Brecht on the other? How did these two come together in this? What do you call this, when you provoke riots and use the audience as members of the cast? When you can stage events that brings the audience on the stage—but there is no formal stage? But it’s a theatricalized event…? It’s all new. So I called it ‘guerrilla theater.’ And Ronnie heard that phrase, and wrote an essay about doing Left provocative theater. That wasn’t what I saw. I saw it as being deeper than that. And I began writing plays that now were for sure plays except that a lot of the dialogue was spontaneously derived from the performers—we had some really great performers at the Mime Troupe at the time, I’d say there were at least a dozen good performers, and a couple who were really brilliant. Anyways, put these people together, I gave them a context, and we began improvising dialogue.
At the same time I had in mind a couple of ideas. One of them was based on a short story by a former German prisoner of war who was a literary hero of the postwar era in Germany, Wolfgang Borchert, he wrote a number of short stories, one was titled The Dandelion, based on his experience in a Russian prison camp. It was about military prisoners who craved so much to have some sort of human contact that they will take extraordinary risks, and one of them risks getting out of line to run over to where a dandelion is blooming, to look at the flower. And is beaten to death. It must have actually happened. So I wrote a play titled ‘Centerman’ about a military prisoner of war, a German prisoner of war who’s in an American prisoner of war camp, and I thought people will look at this as being exotic but it’s actually what’s happening in Vietnam. So it was a way of talking about Vietnam without directly talking about Vietnam.

Berg goes on to discuss the impact of performing Centerman and how it, and the other guerrilla theater plays he was putting together as Mime Troupe dramatist, directly led to his involvement in the Diggers, and to specific Diggers practices. Read the full interview here.

Okay, with all of that out of the way, here are image files of the relevant pages from Underground, excerpted from the PDF above:

And here is the one Centerman-related photograph that I am aware of, as published in The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years by R.G. Davis (Ramparts Press, 1975):

A guerrilla theater staging of Centerman, 1966. Photo © Erik Weber

Diane di Prima on arriving in San Francisco in 1968 and getting involved with the Diggers/Free City

June 21, 1974: Diane di Prima reminisces and reads her work at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. Here’s a clip:

This is the text of the poem she reads, from Revolutionary Letters:

Full-program video (with downloadable audio) at Poetry Center Digital Archive: https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/239267

‘DIGGERS WELCOME’: A conversation with Nina Blasenheim and Freeman House

I interviewed two members of the San Francisco Diggers, Nina Blasenheim and Freeman (nee Linn) House, together at their home on California’s Lost Coast in August, 2010.

A little background for the uninitiated:

In 2026, the Diggers are little-known. But in 1966-8, such was the Diggers’ presence and notoriety that seemingly every reporter filing a story on the Haight included the Diggers in their account. “A band of hippie do-gooders,” said Time magazine. “A true peace corps,” wrote local daily newspaper columnist (and future Rolling Stone editor) Ralph J. Gleason. The Beatles’ press officer Derek Taylor would later write, “[The Diggers] were in my opinion the core of the whole underground counterculture because they were our conscience.”

So, as the counterculture came into being, the Diggers were there, the Diggers were important, the Diggers were well-known, but crucially, though they acted in public, the Diggers were anonymous. Nobody knew who they were, where they came from, or how they did what they did. In short, they had a mystique: a group of LSD-fueled street anarchists with a philosophy/practice of “everything is free / do you own thing.”

A couple years ago I came across this March 1967 article from the Foghorn, a student newspaper published by the University of San Francisco, a private Jesuit school, that summed up the Diggers vibe succinctly:

The sign on the door said, “You are a digger.” About 50 people had accepted the invitation and moved into the house high in the hills over the Haight-Ashbury.

A cauldron of stew was cooking in the kitchen. The stew, eventually, would be trucked down to the Panhandle, free for anyone with a bowl and a spoon. No one know for sure who brings the food that goes into the stew. Some is donated, some bought, some stolen. The stew would be good today; someone had brought two chickens.

It’s all the work of the Diggers, a mysterious, amorphous group in the Haight-Ashbury dedicated to given things away free and “doing their thing.” They have been evicted from more than half a dozen flats, apartments, and store fronts in the six months of their existence in San Francisco.

One place of refuge is the All Saints Episcopal Church on Waller, where Father Leon Harris has let the Diggers use his church kitchen to prepare the food for the Panhandle for three weeks now.

“The Diggers are industrious, cheerful and benevolent,” he said. “They also give away free clothing and find lodging for homeless people. It seems to me they put a lot of professing Christians to shame by their goodness.”

The conversation with Nina and Freeman in 2010 was the third serious Diggers interview I had conducted in less than 18 hours. Reviewing the recording later, I could tell that although my enthusiasm for the subject was undimmed, fatigue had set in and my lines of questioning and follow-ups were not as solid as they should’ve been.

But it’s still Nina and Freeman, together. What a joy to be in the presence of these two big minds, as they ribbed each other and made each other laugh, as they mulled over memories and tried to come to some sort of understanding about how it all happened the way that it did, and what it might possibly mean. When I walked through their door, they told me they had just been talking together about why exactly interest in the Diggers kept coming around, even after all these years. They seemed genuinely puzzled, and for a few minutes, it was me who was being interviewed about what the answer might be.

Our conversation flowed, with some stops and starts and many detours as they examined the Diggers-related documents that I’d brought along as conversation/memory prompts. Editing this conversation into a satisfying beginning-to-end piece like some of the other oral histories on this site was always going to be a challenge, and it wasn’t until recently, all these years later, that I finally understood that this simply isn’t that kind of piece. It’s something else, which is fine.

Continue reading “‘DIGGERS WELCOME’: A conversation with Nina Blasenheim and Freeman House” →