Woody, It's Been Good t' Know Ya

The house lights go down, and within minutes, we find our toes tapping under the theatre seats, wanting to sing. We know these songs. We’ve heard them performed by Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, by Country Joe McDonald and Joan Baez, by the Kingston Trio and Bruce Springsteen. The youngest in tonight’s audience probably learned at least one of them in school. Woody Guthrie’s tunes are now as traditional as campfire s’mores, but Marin Theatre Company’s Woody Guthrie’s American Song interweaves the legendary folksinger’s familiar music with his unfamiliar writings. All the words in Peter Glazer’s artistic tribute are Guthrie’s, and the voices of a powerful ensemble – five singer-actors and three musicians – interweave the script of this musical show.

In ‘30s costume, the actors begin by talking over one another, describing conditions in the Depression, the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, and then their narratives are lifted into a unified chorus of “Hard Travelin’,” soon followed by “So Long, it’s been Good to Know You.” Woody Guthrie would spend a large part of his life traveling, much of it by foot or by rail, and another part saying goodbye.

In the mid-1930s, he leaves a wife and three children and sets out to ride the rails to California. Here he encounters a group of fellow self-described Dust Bowl Refugees in the boxcar of a speeding train. As they race along to “This Train is Bound for Glory,” the lights flash, the brakes squeal, and the entire stage seems to shake – a brilliant piece of staging by Director Glazer, with David K.H. Elliott’s lighting and Ted Crimy’s sound.

Arrival in California is a bitter letdown, though. Anticipated work on Fresno’s Friant Dam has not begun yet, and nobody can live in this state without the necessary “Do Re Mi.” Guthrie spends time with other squatters in a ramshackle campground called The Jungle outside Redding. The Jungle is even bigger than the town, and there’s no sign of work anywhere. Two of the women sing that it takes a worried man to sing a worried song, and others vow, “I Ain’t Gonna be Treated This Way.”

In the ‘40s, the singer finds himself in New York City, engaged in a delightful musical duel for tips with another busker called the Cisco Kid. (They settle it with hats.) The big city now feeds inspiration for other tunes about the subway, the Holland Tunnel, the unions, even the “Jolly Banker,” waltz, in which the banker declares, “I take great interest in all that I do.” “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” an actual event, forecasts W.W. II, during which Woody served in the merchant marine and was torpedoed twice.

He was struck with his mother’s disease, Huntington’s Chorea, when he was only forty. Increasing nerve damage led to fifteen years of hospitalization. But no one in America can say that Woodrow Wilson Guthrie led a short, unremarkable life. “He was a man,” says one of the play’s final voices, “who told you something that you already knew.”

The Company of actors and singers is excellent to a person. Four of them – Sam Misner, Megan Smith, Lisa Asher and Matthew Mueller – are also members of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. They’re joined in this production by Bay Area performer Berwick Haynes.

And though the guitar was Woody’s instrument, American Song adds a mandolin, fiddle, banjo, bass viol, piano and dobro from onstage musicians Tony Marcus, Chuck Ervin and Harry Yaglijian.

Woody Guthrie’s American Song concludes on a high note with the number we’ve all been waiting for – “This Land is Your Land.” Sing along!

MTC’s popular final production of the ’09-’10 season has been extended through June 27. Ticket prices range from $37 to $54, with student and senior discounts available.
Total playing time is two and a half hours, including one intermission. For group sales, call Julie Knight, 388-5200, x3302. For additional information, time, prices or reservations, please see www.marintheatre.org or call 388-5200.