Woody Sez: The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie

Music with Narrative (2012)

Devised by David M. Lutken with Nick Corley and
Darcie Deaville, Helen Jean Russell and Andy Teirstein

Music Director: David M. Lutken

Director: Nick Corley

American Repertory Theatre
Cambridge, MA

Woody Guthrie was one of the great American folk music heroes of the twentieth century. He grew up on a farm in Oklahoma and traveled far and wide – to Calfornia, during the environmental and human tragedies of the dust bowl and the associated great migration, to New York where he lived for five years, and all around the country. He developed a keen sense of social justice and sympathy for the downtrodden which he communicated through his vast library of folk songs.

It came to light fairly recently that Woody Guthrie had a large volume of lyrics stored in a trunk. His daughter, Nora Guthrie, in recent years, has begun to commission various musical groups to put some of these lyrics to music. A well known klezmer band, The Klezmatics, produced a great album of songs set to Woody Guthrie lyrics in 2006 named Wonder Wheel.

Woody Sez is essentially an overivew of Woody’s life told through a series of twenty-eight songs accompanied by an ongoing narration. The music is exceptionally well done. David M. Lutken, who plays Woody, has brought together three other wonderful musicians and the results are just fantastic.

Darcie Deaville, who plays a wild mandolin and an even wilder fiddle, is really gripping. Lutken is affecting as Woody and also compelling and resonant as a singer and guitarist. Helen Jean Russell and Andy Teirstein are both wonderful complements to the quartet. One could easily attend this performance for the music alone and be entirely satisfied.

The accompanying narrative is heartfelt and gives a pretty good account of the trajectory of Woody’s life, but it has a bit of a now I did this and then I did that flavor. The moments when it really comes to life are the points of drama: his witnessing the travails of people trying to get work in a labor camp in California and suffering the manipulations of the bosses, and the accounts of tragic, accidental deaths of several members of Woody’s family.

Part of the issue is that despite his musical and social passion, Woody Guthrie had a humble demeanor and a mode of speech which easily slides into a muted narrative. In a casual recounting of his life, this aw, shucks manner comes across as charmingly reserved. But, in a stage play, which relies more heavily on a sense of dramatic punctuation, it does not provide as much in the way of structure as it might.

Nonetheless, though this mutedness in the narrative gives a kind of linearity to the evening, it is most enjoyable. The music is just wonderful, and one can certainly adjust to a different kind of expectation about story and drama to absorb it.

The ART, under Diane Paulus’ artistic direction over the past several years, has pushed the envelope about what theatrical productions are and what they require in order to create satisfying aesthetic encounters.

This kind of narratively amplified folk fest is right in keeping with that species of experimentation. Though it is not standard theatre, it is most satisfying in other ways, and we must appreciate Paulus’ and the ART’s interest in expanding our horizon of expectations within the larger theatrical embrace.

– BADMan