Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie. Peoples Light & Theater Company, Malvern, PA, August 2018.
Our nation was lucky to have Woody Guthrie as an inspiration during two historic periods. First, he was a troubadour of the Great Depression, composing and performing anthems for the poor and dispossessed. Then he became an icon during the anti-Vietnam War era, even though he was no longer able to perform.
His songs “This Land is Your Land” and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” live on. His life, however, is unfamiliar to today’s younger generation. Considering the inequalities of society, and widespread feelings of alienation, his message could be valuable. The show called Woody Sez valiantly tries to re-awaken his spirit.
Guthrie voiced the feelings of migrants and factory laborers and farm workers. He denounced big business and wrote a column for a Communist party newspaper titled “Woody Sez.” All the while, he had to cope with the probability that he’d succumb to the hereditary illness that caused his mother to be hospitalized for insanity and to die young.
Woody Sez works beautifully as a musical hootenanny. As a dramatic story, it could be better.
Everyone in the cast sings and plays multiple instruments, just as they did in the show Ring of Fire: The Music of Johnnie Cash, which was similarly conceived by David M. Lutken. Cast members take turns on keyboards, guitar, ukelele, violin, acoustic bass, harmonica, autoharp, mandolin, zither, washboard, and even silverware. The performers insist on no amplification, no microphones — keeping the music natural. Their physical hijinks and dance steps add extra enjoyment.
The program lists 45 songs (some of them being alternate versions) and the lyrics of all of them are memorably trenchant, while the melodies tend to be simple.
The tall and lean Lutken resembles Guthrie, and he sings with the same nasal twang. Andy Teirstein, Helen J. Russell and Darcie Deaville, three of the originators of this show, were in the cast when I attended and their authenticity was palpable. Mimi Bessette and Spiff Wiegand appeared during the show’s first two weeks at this theater.
Guthrie’s life is evoked in a series of vignettes, starting with his childhood in Oklahoma. But much is omitted. For example, we see only one romantic incident and the woman then disappears from the stage; we aren’t told whether or not she became one of Guthrie’s wives. His isolationist views in the Thirties are glossed over. (He did eventually join the war effort.) And the script ignores the fears Guthrie surely had about his sanity and his mortality. A shame, because that topic could have been very dramatic.
I wish the script told us more about what led him to write “The Ferguson Brothers Killing,” which condemned the police killing of two unarmed black men on Long Island in 1946 after they were refused service at a café. Similarly, the back-story of “Buoy Bells from Trenton” which was about six black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury.
It’s unfortunate that Lutken and his team omitted Guthrie’s confrontation with the Trump Organization. In 1950 Woody rented an apartment in one of Fred Trump’s lily-white buildings, and he protested the exclusion of blacks. Guthrie wrote: “I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much Racial Hate he stirred up when he drawed that color line here.” Two years later, Guthrie was diagnosed as an alcoholic and confined to a mental institution. Then his problem was correctly identified as Huntington’s chorea, the same genetically-transmitted disorder that had killed his mother. After years as an invalid, he died in 1967.