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 asked. The latter was a reference to local group Big Art & The Trashmasters. In 1976, Dan Fogerty, brother of the Creedence Clearwater Revival Fogertys, bought La Val’s, and manager Roger Spenger, of the Fish Grotto Spengers, became a partner a few years later. Under its new owners, the basement became a literal underground theatre. After Stanley Spenger, Roger’s brother, put on a production of Twelfth Night in 1987, it gained a new name: the “Subterranean Cabaret.”
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Baal rehearsal, 1996. Courtesy of Patrick Dooley -
Set for Doctor Faustus, 1995. Courtesy of Patrick Dooley -
Shotgun Players’ The Merchant of Venice cast, 1994. Courtesy of Patrick Dooley
Almost immediately, Spenger told California, other theater groups began flocking to the space. With scrappiness and gumption, they made it their own. Desks receded into walls (Glengarry Glen Ross). Trick doors and “all these things” opened up on stage (Kafka, naturally). “You could take this little square and turn it into wherever you wanted to go.”
For nearly 40 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, Central Works, Upstart Stage, Spenger’s own 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 founded Shotgun Players in 1992, 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 Spenger. 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.”
Across the decades, 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. There was a John Molloy monologue, performed by the Irish actor and playwright himself, that sold out at $6 a ticket. A production of Much Ado About Nothing that may or may not have crammed a few more audience members in than the fire code allowed. 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 Spenger explained in his post, “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, amid increased enrollment and the rise of the Bay’s tech sector, venues have become less affordable and the counter-cultural vibe of earlier years has become memory.
So The Sub doesn’t host after-parties for musicians 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 seats, stiff school desks presumably taken from an unlucky classroom long ago, foretell a good show as much as ever.
Editor’s Note: This piece has been revised from a previously published version.
