Andy Striph and Mary Adams                                                 Photos by Michael Blase

 

                                  By Marc Miller 

Folk music is not at the forefront of American popular culture these days. There was the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis a couple of years back, and Christopher Guest and the Second City bunch’s hilarious A Mighty Wind some years before that, and then you’d have to go all the way back to Peter, Paul, and Mary. It’s a puzzlement. At its best, the genre is heartfelt, tuneful, and ripe with intelligent social comment, and heaven knows we could use more of that.

So let’s bow to Tom Attea (book and lyrics) and Arthur Abrams (music), whose new little musical The Folk Singer is an attempt to put folk music front and center in the cultural debate, singing tunes about modern foibles that might resonate as loudly and meaningfully as “Blowin’ in the Wind” did decades back, or “This Land Is Your Land” did during the Depression. It’s a simple format, really no more than a folk concert with the slenderest of framing devices. Don (Andy Striph) is a folk singer-songwriter in a rotting post-industrial corner of West Virginia, hard up for work, with no one but his girlfriend Kim (Micha Lazare) to offer emotional support. At the no-frills bar run by Frank (Larry Fleischmann), who’s meant to be wisecracking good company but isn’t given anything interesting to say, the couple hatches a plan: invite the other local down-and-out folk singers—who would have guessed so many down-and-out folk singers were roaming West Virginia?—get them all to write new folk songs about current subjects, and have a folk festival, in the hope that it will go up on YouTube and go viral.

. L to R: Mary Adams and Andy Striph in THE FOLK

So, presto: setup, concert, fadeout. Our enjoyment of it will depend on the quality of the songs and the quality of the singers, and not much else. And it would be a pleasure to report that Attea and Abrams have breathed new life into the form, finding fetching ways to make a venerable American art form relevant again. Does that happen? Well, Abrams does get near a tune a couple of times, as in the appealing “A Newborn Child,” wherein Amy (Mary Adams, with a lovely alto) ponders the sort of world newborns are entering. But he keeps resorting to the same melodic figures, with a preponderance of G-A-G-F-E (in C), and Attea’s social comment doesn’t get much deeper than “Oh, when will we finally make a world that’s worthy of that newborn child?” Wordplay is unknown to him, and many of the songs come off not so much as folk songs, but as essays set to music. They’re repetitive in subject matter—two songs about unemployed blue-collar workers, two about war, two about the environment, and a couple of flat-out love ballads. Interspersed among the playlist, for some reason, are some unappetizing blackout sketches. Some lyrics are just awkward: “Since when is it OK to kill innocent civilians/ And even worse, to slay them by the gazillions?” And Brittany (Olivia A. Griffen) tries hard with “Do You Mind Tellin’ Me Why?”, about a teenage friend of hers who died of a self-inflicted abortion attempt, but sorry, “Her call to 911 came after she had bled/ Too much and they found the coat hanger lyin’ beside her bed” is never, never going to work as a lyric. Throughout, a mellow four-piece band accompanies, and some nice noises are made, though Alex Santullo’s muddy sound design does it no favors.

Mary Adams, Olivia A. Griffin, Andy Stiph, Matthew Angel and Nick McGuiness

The stage is littered with dropped g’s—tellin’, lyin’, livin’—and uncertain Southern accents, and the singers have their moments, but aren’t allowed to develop distinct personalities. Amy is earnest and vulnerable, while Olivia is earnest and vulnerable, while Todd (Matthew Angel) is earnest and angry, while Zack (Nick McGuiness) at least has a playful streak. He’s assigned “The Day Lincoln’s Statue Came to Life,” in which the Great Emancipator is revived to berate present-day legislators for refusing to cooperate, and Democrats and Republicans rise and cheer him, as if that were a great idea they never thought of. This is followed by a sketch in which a Republican lifeguard throws a drowning swimmer back in the sea when he finds out she’s a Democrat. That’s one of the better sketches.

Mark Marcante’s direction is barely direction, it’s so face-front-and-plant-your-feet-and-sing, though he does send Angel out into the audience for one uncomfortable moment; when you’ve labored to set up the fourth wall, you’d better have a reason for crashing it down. There’s not a lot going on visually, though an unbilled contributor has worked on projections and footage to buttress the storytelling; there are some enjoyable moments of ’50s propaganda films to accompany “Sittin’ on a Nuclear Bomb,” even if the words run to “Got tons of kilotons/ Right here under our buns.”

It’s no fun reporting this, because The Folk Singer is a well-intentioned wisp of a good idea. Had Attea studied Dylan and Guthrie and Baez and others more diligently and honed his songwriting skills more thoroughly, and had Abrams worked more melody into these sung treatises, and had the characters been conceived beyond generic out-of-work singer-songwriters, The Folk Singer might prove folk music’s validity in today’s troubled world. Alas, it will take more finely wrought folk music than this.

The Folk Singer is at Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave., New York, through Oct. 23. For tickets, call the box office (212-254-1109) or SmartTix (212-868-4444), or visit smarttix.com.