Woody Guthrie: Spokesperson for the Lost

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from Dissent magazine:



Woody Guthrie: Spokesperson for the Lost
Zach Pontz - November 16, 2011


The latest drama by playwright and actor Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith opens with a dying man lying supine in bed, ravaged by the effects of Huntington’s disease. But this is no ordinary man. He’s an iconoclast, one of the original artist-activists, a major influence on the 1960s civil rights movement, a man who could reduce counterculture demigods like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to mere idolaters. This man is Woody Guthrie, and in Woody Guthrie Dreams, which ran at the Theater for the New City in Manhattan’s East Village in September, this is how we first find the legendary folksinger (played by Smith): alone, immobile, and impotent, hanging on to the last remnants of a life of extreme vicissitudes. This version of Woody is a mere shadow of the celebrated folk troubadour, and for the rest of the play we watch as this all-but-dormant body slips into a retrospective reverie.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1912 to Charles and Nora Belle Guthrie. His was initially a life of country quaintness, but at the age of seven his older sister died in a coal oil fire accident, and by the age of eight his father had met financial ruin while his mother began to show signs of the Huntington’s disease that would prematurely kill her. By 1927 he had been left in the care of his eldest brother Roy while his dad worked in Texas and his mother was in the hospital, where she was committed for insanity due to a misdiagnosis. By the age of nineteen Woody was married and heading west to California with millions of Dust Bowl migrants. This period marked the beginning of Guthrie’s peripatetic and independent lifestyle, and effectively shaped his political character as well. He experienced firsthand the poverty and exploitative conditions that migrants were subjected to.

Smith, who is a musician as well as an actor and writer, was originally drawn to Guthrie in 2004 because of his music. But extensive research, which led him to the Woody Guthrie archives in New York and included interviews with close Guthrie confidant and traveling partner Pete Seeger as well as Guthrie’s daughter Nora, revealed to him different complexions of Guthrie’s life. The play, as a result, adopted a theme and tone of flawed character and failed activism that has been largely absent from discussions of Guthrie. “People think of him as this saintly person who wrote ‘This Land is Your Land,’ which we all sung along to in school, but that wasn’t who he actually was,” Smith told me.

Guthrie was a radical leftist and a devout Communist. He stood by Stalin even after the great purges and famines, advocated isolationism while Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini began to carve up Europe, and ridiculed Roosevelt for his New Deal. Guthrie ultimately came around to the cause of the Second World War, serving in the Merchant Marine and even becoming an admirer of Roosevelt’s, but the postwar years saw him grow increasingly alienated from the unions he had supported, as they cast off their Communist roots in the face of the Cold War. As Eisenhower’s stifling fifties closed in around him and the McCarthy era dawned, friends such as Pete Seeger were blacklisted for their Communist activities and affiliations, and Guthrie became paranoid and defensive. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=562