<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i><font class="Apple-style-span" size="6" color="#990000">Woody Guthrie’s American Song</font></i></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><i>by Mitch Allen</i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><b><i><br></i></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"><b><i>Woody Guthrie’s American Song</i></b> 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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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:</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">My brothers and my sisters are
stranded on this road,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">A hot and dusty road that a million
feet have trod;</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">Rich man took my home and drove me
from my door</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">And I ain’t got no home in this
world anymore.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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:</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">This train don’t carry no gamblers,
this train;</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">This train don’t carry no gamblers,
this train;</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">This train don’t carry no gamblers,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">This train is bound for glory, this
train.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">I told you, Woody is for the people.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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:</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">The crops are all in and the
peaches are rott’ning,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">The oranges piled in their creosote
dumps;</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">They’re flying ‘em back to the Mexican
border</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">To pay all their money to wade back
again</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye,
Rosalita,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">You won’t have your names when you
ride the big airplane,</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">All they will call you will be
“deportees.”</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.”</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">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.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><font class="Apple-style-span" size="4">The Actors’ Summit
performance of <b><i>Woody Guthrie’s American Song</i></b> continues through October 30. For
show times and additional information, visit <a href="http://www.ActorsSummit.org">www.ActorsSummit.org</a> 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.</font></p>