Independence Day last week featured, as it always does, dozens of renditions of Woody Guthrie’s classic anthem This Land Is Your Land. Like many influential figures, though, Guthrie’s actual life and ideas are more illuminating and interesting than the mythology that sprang up in his wake. This is the point of the show Woody Guthrie’s American Song, playing now through July 22 at the Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley.
Peter Glazer, who directs this performance, wrote the original play in 1988 based on Guthrie’s essays, letters, and prose writings, which he used to “set up a landscape for his songs to inhabit.”
“People may not realize how fiercely observant Guthrie was and that he was really a great chronicler of the ‘30s and ‘40s. It was a singular moment in the American ethos ... And that’s one reason his ideas resonate so profoundly now; he tapped into essential issues of America as a nation: racial divisions, class differences, worry about immigrants.”
Glazer stresses the point that this “life of the rambling folk singer through his words and music” is not a documentary: Rather, it’s an attempt to convey the power of Guthrie’s work and his persona, which was built on his interaction with all the people he met in his life.
“When I first got the idea to do the show,” says Glazer, “I realized that Guthrie got his music and his ideas and histories from the people he encountered every day, whether on skid row in New York or on the road. And so I didn’t want to do a one-man show, because that didn’t give me the ability to explore the relationships he had with these people. The protagonist here is never one person. The “I” moves through the entire ensemble, everyone takes on the first person voice, and in that way I’m spreading his voice around, I’m filtering Guthrie through these different sensibilities.”
Glazer adds that the power of Guthrie is also very personal.
“My father was a folk singer and performed with Guthrie and that whole collection of singers that formed around Alan Lomax. I never met Guthrie myself and for that reason I was not that conscious of Woody as a person. But years later when we got the songbook, I was aghast at the emotional content of the material.
“When the show started, my dad, Tom Glazer, was still alive, and he would come up to me during rehearsals sometimes, and he would say, 'you know there’s actually another verse that would fit in this scene' or 'there’s a particular harmony you might consider here.' He brought his own sensibility when he would come to see the show. And after all, he lived it. But this gave the two of us something that we shared, in its content and quality, and it created the ability to have a conversation about music that we’d never had before. It gave us a whole new aspect to our relationship.”
This musical is intergenerational then, and seems tailormade for kids nine and up, especially those who might think that history is boring. Don’t miss the free open house on Woody’s birthday, July 14, from 1 p.m.-5 p.m., featuring performances by the cast, and viewing of the exhibition of letters that runs concurrently with the show.
Woody Guthrie’s American Song, Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse, July 11-22, tickets $22.50 (in advance).