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:

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):