[NEohioPAL] Another Rave for WOODY GUTHRIE'S AMERICAN SONG at Actors' Summit -- Final Weekend

[Neil Thackaberry]

*Woody Guthrie’s American Song*

*by Mitch Allen*

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*Woody Guthrie’s American Song* began a four-week run at Actors’ Summit on
Friday, October 7, presented at Greystone Hall in downtown Akron. The Peter
Glazer play traces the life of the American troubadour who gave a passionate
voice to America during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.



If you’re looking for the feel good production of the year, this ain’t it.
If you’re looking to be touched by how far our nation has come—and how far
it has yet to go—since our parents and grandparents stood in the bread lines
in the 1930s, you’ll find this performance incredibly moving. I sure did.



There is no orchestra. That would be a slap in the face to Woody who was a
man of the people. Instead, the music is performed by the cast members
themselves, filling the former Masonic temple with the raw sounds of guitar,
banjo, mandolin, fiddle and bass.



Even the fiddlers—Actors’ Summit veteran Sally Groth and Emma Picht, a
seventh grader from Miller South School for the Performing Arts—manage to
sing while their chins are firmly pressed against their fiddles. The voice
of MaryJo Alexander, the co-artistic director of Actors’ Summit, balances a
bit of matronly power with the humbleness of the age in a way that glues the
cast together.



Woody Guthrie’s American Song is a rootin’ tootin’, knee-slappin’, totally
unplugged music fest for the people, and it’s also astonishingly appropriate
for 2011 America. Who would have believed that the hunger, high
unemployment, homelessness, foreclosures, classism and immigration issues of
the 1920-40s would reemerge so similarly today? Consider this line from I
Ain’t Got No Home:

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,

A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;

Rich man took my home and drove me from my door

And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.



Keith Stevens, Scott Davis, Mark Leach, Dana Hart and Ryan Anderson each
play a different persona of Woody Guthrie as he travels around America. The
four men not only share songs, they finish each other’s sentences, an effect
that appropriately punctuates the notion that Woody is a part of all of
us—no matter who we are:

This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;

This train don’t carry no gamblers, this train;

This train don’t carry no gamblers,

Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,

This train is bound for glory, this train.



A scene when Woody is booted from a moving train hit home particularly hard
for me. My grandfather’s brother, a native of Alabama, was killed when he
was thrown from a train while riding the rails in 1930s California. Really,
he was.



My own grandfather rode the rails to Ohio from Alabama with a few cronies
during the Depression and ended up doing a few months in an Ohio prison for
stealing a check out of a mailbox (a felony no matter how hungry you are).
Decades later he was pardoned by Alabama governor and 1968 presidential
hopeful George Wallace, not because he deserved it, but because another
brother wound up in politics and pushed it through.

I told you, Woody is for the people.



In Plane Wreck at Los Gatos, the beautiful Sally Groth delivers a haunting
account of how Mexican workers were treated in Woody Guthrie’s 1940s
America:

The crops are all in and the peaches are rott’ning,

The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;

They’re flying ‘em back to the Mexican border

To pay all their money to wade back again

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,

Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you will be “deportees.”



It turns out that audiences aren’t the only ones getting a history lesson.
“The range and energy of Woody’s music, and the history he chronicled have
been a real education for the younger members of the cast,” says Actor’s
Summit co-artistic director Neil Thackaberry. “Some of our younger actors
have discovered the human cost of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.”

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, named in honor of the U.S. president, was born in
1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma. In his early teens, with bad times at home, Woody
took to the road from Texas to California, working the farms and orchards,
with odd jobs here and there, until he landed a radio program of his own in
late 1939 in Los Angeles.



In October 1967, after many years in hospitals, Woody Guthrie died as a
result of Huntington’s disease. He had written over 1,000 songs. This
Actors’ Summit cast sings about 20 of them.



The Actors’ Summit performance of *Woody Guthrie’s American Song* continues
through October 30. For show times and additional information, visit
www.ActorsSummit.org or call 330-374-7568. Individual ticket prices range
from $19 at preview performances and Saturday matinees to $30 for Friday and
Saturday evenings. All full-time students.
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