If you were a Cal student anytime in the past six decades, chances are that you went to La Val’s Pizza on Euclid Ave. Maybe you went for a slice or a beer. But if you knew the right people, you might’ve found yourself in the underground theater in the basement.
After descending a dark staircase, you’d find yourself in a roughly 16-by-12-foot room that, in the ’60s, played host to jamming musicians like Pops Foster, Bruce Conte, and Jerry Garcia. There was sawdust on the floor and, reportedly, a small bar. There’s no sawdust anymore and the bar is gone, but the basement is still attracting small audiences of those in the know.
It was originally called “The Cantina,” or “The Hard Times,” or “Big Art’s Hard Times,” depending who you ask. The latter was a reference to local group Big Art & The Trashmasters. It became La Val’s Subterranean Cabaret—and later, Theatre—in 1976, when Roger Spenger and Dan Fogerty, brother of the two Creedence Clearwater Revival Fogertys, bought the pizzeria. Under its new owners, the basement was home to all sorts of art.
Then, in 1990, a theater company called Central Works opened its first show down below, making The Sub a literal underground theater. For nearly forty years now, a stream of black-box theater companies have leased The Sub from the owners of La Val’s. Some of the notable thespians that got their start in The Sub include Impact Theater, Subterranean Shakespeare, and Shotgun Players (who now perform on their own, larger stage on Ashby and MLK). As of 2017, Theatre Lunatico has taken up The Subterranean torch.
Patrick Dooley, who created Shotgun Players on the spot when Roger Spenger asked if he had a theater company, described The Sub this way: “The fact that it’s underground gives it a certain mystique… This is a space that’s built for risk. It felt risky to be down there.” Sitting in the pizza parlor on a recent afternoon, he said, “It’s like a speakeasy. It smells kind of funky and it’s got these low ceilings. There’s something a little bit ‘walk on the wild side’ about it.”
Dooley’s experiences are echoed by Stanley Spenger, brother of Roger Spenger and founder of Subterranean Shakespeare. As he wrote in a comment on Facebook, “The space was intimate, difficult, and unlike any conventional theater. You could hear audiences breathe. They could hear every word spoken. Actors were practically in the spectators’ laps. It encouraged immediacy, risk, and invention.”
Over its sixty years, many of the artists in the basement have been Cal students or alums (including Dead Poets Society actor Dylan Kussman ’94). All the art was good for business. La Val’s gave theater companies free rehearsal space in the ’80s and ’90s as long as they brought in flocks of hungry students.
But times have changed. As Stanley Spenger explained, “Part of what made The Sub important was Berkeley itself in that era. Affordable rents, student audiences, political energy, and a strong experimental arts culture… The Sub fit perfectly into that ecology.” Since then, the Bay’s tech sector has skyrocketed and venues have become less affordable. As the university expanded, the counter-cultural vibe of earlier years has become memory.
So The Sub doesn’t host after-parties for rockstars anymore. The floors aren’t covered with sawdust and the seats aren’t packed like they used to be. But it’s still operating—available as always to student audiences. It’s still a place of intimate risk, a world apart from the football games and pool tables in the pizza parlor above. And the Sub’s stiff seats, school desks presumably taken from an unlucky classroom long ago, foretell a good show as much as ever.
