WOODY GUTHRIE’S AMERICAN SONG
Briar Street Theatre
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That Guthrie’s vision has continued to shine through several generations of interpreters–including his son Arlo–is tribute to his power and poetry. The finely honed arrangements of Peter Glazer’s documentary-biography-revue, Woody Guthrie’s American Song, may offend purists, but they definitely reveal the humble wisdom and transcendent beauty of the originals. And now the 1991 Northlight Theatre production, which captured three of the top Joseph Jefferson awards later that year, is being revived virtually intact at the Briar Street Theatre. “This is a mighty big barn,” comments one of the musicians, but the cavernous new quarters do not in any way diminish the exhilaration of a scene in which Woody, riding a boxcar roof in the rain, hears the singing of the folks beneath and defies the lightning: “Strike, goddam you, strike! There’s people you can’t hurt!” Nor do they affect the triumph of a scene in which a barroom critic is silenced by a roomful of people singing “Union Maid” (“You can’t scare me / I’m sticking to the union”) and gradually won over by the patriotic “The Sinking of the Reuben James.” Nor do they destroy the haunting compassion of the ensemble’s “Pastures of Plenty”: “Every state in the union, we migrants have been / We come with the dust and are gone with the wind.”
“They are the people who follow the seasons,” said Guthrie in his autobiography, Bound for Glory. “They don’t just set along in the sun. They go by the sun, and it lights up the country they know is theirs.” At first glance the expensively dressed opening-night crowd may have seemed a strange match with the disenfranchised people Guthrie celebrates. But on second thought, many of those audience members may be of an age to fully understand the penury of those Depression days. Guthrie, with his eternal hope for better times, might have been pleased to see how well his compatriots and their children and grandchildren have done for themselves since those dusty years.
