San Francisco Chronicle – May 20, 2007

Summer of Love: 40 Years Later
Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft

PETER BERG AND JUDY GOLDHAFT, directors of Planet Drum, a grassroots ecology outreach program that encourages regional sustainability around the world. THEN: Peter Berg and his wife, Judy Goldhaft, were original members of the Diggers, the Haight-Ashbury community group that served free food daily in the Panhandle, operated the Free Store and so much more.

BERG: 1966 was the Digger year. Emmett Grogan walked into the San Francisco Mime Troupe when I was the assistant director and Judy had been there a long time.

GOLDHAFT: I directed things and performed in things.

BERG: We were involved with the idea of taking theater off the stage and into people’s hands. So I had evolved a concept of guerrilla theater, and guerrilla theater was to actively engage people in some action, or witness some event that would make them sort of a conspirator. [The couple had participated in early guerrilla theater pieces during the Free Speech Movement protests at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in ’64]. I had cast Emmett in a couple of small cabaret things, and it became obvious to all of us that the next step — you know, in the theater it’s called breaking the fourth wall — the next step was to have actors doing things that acted out alternatives. The label I put on that was ‘life acting.’ And by the way, Emmett was not a very good stage actor, but he was a hell of a life actor! He was a pretty charismatic person. He and Billy Murcott went on top of the building during the Fillmore riots [triggered by the September, 1966 police shooting of an African-American teenager suspected of robbery] and they saw this acting out of, one could say, revolution, maybe with a small ‘r.’ What it inspired them to do was to make a kind of manifesto for people who weren’t involved with the black struggle, that was on an equal footing. And to them it was to be communalistic and altruistic. Billy Mercott had been reading a book about (Gerrard) Winstanley, the leader of the English heretical, communalistic group — and very Christian, by the way — called the diggers. So Billy said, ‘Well, you know, dig, like to dig, dig this, man. Together they made a manifesto that they tacked up on the front door of the Mime Troupe on Howard Street, next to that journalists’ bar, the M&M. This was like [Martin Luther] tacking the 99 thesis on the cathedral door.

I looked at it, and I saw the life-actor potential in it. Which was, a group who called themselves Diggers could begin acting out a lot of the positive alternatives that the Left presumed would occur if there was a successful, small ‘r’ revolution. And for me, those were more anarchistic, than they were ideologically Lefty. It goes something like this: If you say something is wrong, then you can propose something that’s better. The better thing needs to be seen to be believed. So, we thought, if you act out the ideas — a lot of people collaborated on the ideas, ‘everything is free, do your own thing.’