BOUND FOR GUTHRIE

Playwright's Folk Pedigree had Him A-courtin' the Music Legend from an Early Age

For Bay Area playwright Peter Glazer, the continued success of his musical Woody Guthrie's American Song is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it's been in production, someplace or another, since its premiere in 1988—the Marin Theatre Company is staging it this month [don't miss Lee Brady's review on page 29]. On the other hand, the social injustice, Depression-era poverty and foreclosures that informed many of the legendary folk singer's ballads still dominate the headlines.

"Here we are singing a song in the show about immigrants who decades ago were being arrested and deported," Glazer says, referring to Guthrie lament "Deportees." "And yet here we find ourselves right in the middle of that same situation."

The MTC production, directed by Glazer, features the cast of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival's 2008 production and an ace band of bluegrass and folk musicians and singers. The show includes such popular Guthrie songs as "This Land Is Your Land," "Bound for Glory" and "Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way," all set in vignettes that lend context to the times from which those songs emerged.

In many ways, Glazer is uniquely qualified to have brought Guthrie's music to the stage—his father, Tom Glazer, was a popular New York City folk singer who performed with Guthrie, Pete Seeger and other prominent folkies.

"I certainly grew up in the folk music idiom," Glazer says, "but I didn't know a lot about Woody until I was working as a director and playwright in New York City, during the 1970s, and I came upon a fabulous book of Woody's prose called Born to Win."

The collection of essays, letters, unpublished lyrics, poems—edited by Robert Shelton—was the only published collection of prose by Guthrie, who wrote extensively in the 1930s and '40s while rambling around the country and serving as a merchant seaman.

"I realized the prose could become the landscape for his music, because he wrote so beautifully about how he saw the role of music and what he thought of the role of the folksinger in society."

The book also helped Glazer realize that his own stagecraft had something in common with Guthrie's songcraft. "The first bit of prose in that book describes how the folksinger borrows what they do from the people around them and then gives it back," he says. "Guthrie felt that sense of exchange—giving and taking—was an essential piece of the folksinger's art. And that, to me, felt very much like what theater is, that kind of a dialogue across the musical footlights, if you will."

First, Glazer sought the approval of Harold Leventhal, the influential manager and booking agent who was handling business affairs for the Guthrie estate following the folk singer's death in 1967 after a long debilitating illness. Glazer held a closed reading of his then work-in-progress for Leventhal and a small group of colleagues. "He and his wife came to the reading, and at the end he was in tears," Glazer says. "He said, 'I wish this material weren't so pertinent.'"

Ultimately, Glazer says, it is Guthrie's genius as a storyteller that has made these songs so enduring. "Woody has a line in the play that goes: 'I can't invent the news, but I can do my little job, which is to fix the day's news up to where you can sing it. You'll remember it a lot plainer if I can make it easy for you to sing.'

"And that's part of what the show is doing."

—by Greg Cahill

NOW PLAYING

Woody Guthrie's American Song runs through June 27 at Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley. 415/388-5208. http://www.marintheatre.org .

This land is Greg's land at gcahill51@gmail.com.