David Lutken

 

 

 

 

                           by Deirdre Donovan

 

“Unless we do hear the work songs, war songs, love songs and dance songs of all the people everywhere, we are most apt to lose the peace, and this world right along with it.”  That is a line from Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie, now playing at the Irish Repertory Theater.  The line may well be the open sesame to understanding Woody Guthrie, the troubadour of the common folk in America.

 

Woody Sez is the brainchild of Broadway veteran David Lutken, who plays the title role and is accompanied on stage by three able performers:  Darcie Deaville, David Finch, and Helen Jean Russell.  The foursome are all crackerjack musicians and play various instruments during the show, including fiddles, guitars, a harmonica, mandolin, and bass and even spoons.

 

Megan Loomis, Helen Jean Russell, David M. Lutken             Carol Rosegg.JPG

 

This show got its stage legs a decade ago at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2007.  Since then, it has evolved into a longer piece and toured to many venues in America and the West End.  On June 8^th, it winged into New York and settled into the Irish Repertory Theater, where it will run (after being extended twice) through September 10^th. 

 

Much of the charm of Woody Sez is in its homespun tone.  The four performers on stage are inviting you to take a journey with them to get up close and personal with the icon. Lutken always refers to the legend by his first name “Woody,” and by the time you exit the theater, you can’t help but feel that you know “Woody” like a family member.

 

This theatrical journey stretches from 1912 through 1967.  It highlights some well-known and lesser-known events in the ballad singer’s life and is peppered with a generous swath of his songs.  You learn that he was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, and died 55 years later in New York, a victim of Huntington’s Disease.  For the better part of those years, however, he traversed America with his social justice songs and left a deep and permanent mark on the musical world.  He influenced a younger generation of singers who also had a social-conscience, notably Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

 

The trajectory of the theater piece isn’t as the crow flies.  But if you pay close attention, you can pretty much follow the life of Guthrie from cradle to grave. 

 

The opening number “This Train is Bound for Glory,” sung by the company, brings a strong gospel flavor to the first scene.  The next number “Talkin New York City, 1940” takes you right into the hard-bitten core of the Big Apple.  Lutken, as Guthrie, is singing on a radio station from the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center and having artistic differences with the Program Director.  When the Program Director suggests to Guthrie that he sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” Guthrie boldly asserts his independent streak and sings “This Land is Your Land” with a pointed refrain about the social inequality in America:  “One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple/By the Relief Office I saw my people . . .”  Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the Oklahoma-bred Guthrie won’t linger long at the posh venue.  Indeed, he walks out of the Rainbow Room—and keeps going on ‘til he reaches the hinterlands of America.  And, truth be told, that’s where he’ll begin his true journey as a balladeer of the plain folk. 

 

The show then rewinds to his early years in Oklahoma.  You learn that he was born right after the family’s 7-room yellow house burnt down with no insurance to cover the expense of building a new one. Guthrie’s mother salves over the family situation by singing songs to the young Guthrie, including “Gypsy Davy,” a song about a free-spirit who couldn’t be tied down. 

 

The family situation worsens as the years pass, and Guthrie grows up in the shadow of tragedy.  There’s the death of his beloved sister, and then seeing his aging mother contract Huntington’s Disease and suffer bouts of mental illness that can accompany the hereditary disease.  In any case, the 16 year-old Guthrie, seeing his family life disintegrate before his eyes, ups and leaves his Oklahoma home for Texas, eventually meeting with his father in Pampa.

 

Guthrie’s learns to channel his personal sorrows—as well as other folks’ woes--into his tunes.  There’s songs like “The Ballad of Tom Joad” (#3)” and “Oklahoma Hills” that index Guthrie’s rough-and-tumble days as he reached maturity in Texas.  But it’s his dust bowl ballad “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” sung by the company, that really is the show-stopper of Act 1.  No other number, with the exception of “This Land is My Land,” connects so strongly with the entire audience. 

 

That said, you would have to be a stone to ignore the fiscal reality tucked into “(If You Ain’t Got The) Do-Re-Mi.” This song captures the frustration experienced by those uprooted Americans in the Southwest as they tried to cross over the state line into California in the 30s.  California became like a latter-day Garden of Eden to migrant Americans, an idyllic land that seemed forever beyond their reach.

 

If Act 1 depicts Guthrie growing up and maturing into adulthood, Act 2 shows him as a full-grown man and artist.  The curtain raiser for Act 2 “I Ain’t Got No Home,” sung by Lutken, is a not-so-subtle reminder to the audience that Guthrie was always a ramblin’ man who belonged to the America of the downtrodden and oppressed.  Guthrie seemed to thrive on going on with life, a motto that his mother, in her healthier days, had passed on to him in his youth.

 

The California that John Steinbeck depicted in his novel Cannery Row comes to mind when Deaville, Russell, and Finch sing “I Ride an Old Paint.”  This ballad allows you to listen to the voices of hungry migrant workers in the San Joaquin Valley who can’t be hired to pick fruit in the orchards until the cannery companies give the go-ahead. 

 

If you think the show is narrow in scope, think again.  Not only does Woody Sez offer glimpses of Guthrie’s life from the four corners of the country, but it looks beyond America shores and addresses World War II in the “Sinking of the Reuben James” and “Talkin’ Merchant Marines.” There are also nods to historical figures like Sacco and Vanzetti, Henry Wallace, and Pretty Boy Floyd, all who get immortalized in a medley in Act 2.

 

Those who come to the show as card-carrying Guthrie fans won’t be disappointed.  Others who come out of curiosity will be rewarded by the sweep and breadth of Woody Sez.  While it’s not an in-depth look at the personality of Guthrie and whitewashes the singer’s turbulent personal life, it does serve as a window into the legend’s life and art and puts them in context with his times.

 

Directed by Nick Corley, Woody Sez is the perfect marriage of words and music.  It recreates the beloved Guthrie for the new millennium and touches on themes that embrace workers’ rights, emigrant struggles, and hunger (in all senses of the word).

 

This show, in fact, is the perfect tonic for all who need a break from following the latest breaking news from the White House.  Strangely enough, sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a look back at those who have given us hope in dark times.

 

Through September 10th.

At the Irish Repertory Theater, 132 West 22^nd Street, Manhatttan.

For more information, phone 212-727-2737 or visit www.irishrep.org.

Running Time:  2 hours; 5 minutes with one intermission.