| This Land, a play for puppets and actors derived from the writing, drawing, and music of American folk artist Woody Guthrie, opens September 16 at the Richard Hugo House on Seattle's Capitol Hill. The piece is the inaugural production of the Strawberry Theatre Workshop, whose mission focuses on the same issues of neighborhood and citizenship that Guthrie spoke for.
The show is designed and directed by the Workshop's founder, Greg Carter. "Woody Guthrie's voice is the best possible voice to announce our arrival to the Seattle theatre scene," says Carter. "Because he believed so stridently in the creative power of work. He both recognized the struggle and made an urgent call to participate in the struggle."
Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912 and sought to capture the songs and stories of working people and families who migrated west to California during the Dust Bowl years of the Depression. During his brief but remarkably prolific life, Guthrie also wrote more intimate songs about war, family, sex, fear, love, death, God, and three albums worth of songs for babies. He was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) in 1941 to publicly celebrate the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and made several additional trips to Seattle during his life.
It was in the Northwest that Guthrie wrote some of his signature songs, such as "Pastures of Plenty," "Hard Travelin'," and "Roll On Columbia," the official song of the State of Washington. He is most famous for "This Land Is Your Land", a song most children learn in school, but without its two most political and confrontational verses. Woody Guthrie suffered and died from Huntington's Chorea, which robbed him of his music and forced him to spend his last thirteen years in a hospital before he died in 1967. Through his "hootenanny" concerts all around the nation, as well as appearances on radio and early television, Guthrie was a small celebrity in his own time. But he was never able to appreciate the enormous influence his life would have on American music and on some of the most significant songwriters of the past forty years, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and Ani DiFranco. Woody Guthrie himself was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, and his songs have been recorded by such diverse talents as U2, Emmylou Harris, Judy Collins, Natalie Merchant, Willie Nelson, and Bob Marley. One of Guthrie's proteges was folk musician and activist Pete Seeger, who said "Woody Guthrie showed us all that we can be a part of the past and a part of the future at the same time. He had that love of life, that determination to keep on going no matter what."
In the tribute movie to Woody Guthrie, Folkways: A Vision Shared (1988), Bruce Springsteen said, " I think the heart of [Guthrie's music] cries out for some sort of belief and reckoning with the idea of universal family. Which is something that people long for. That's why it is so resonant, and it will always be resonant. It reaches down and pulls out that part of you that thinks of the next guy and I think that was embedded in every song he wrote, and in every story he told."
This Land also aspires to establish the Strawberry Theatre Workshop as a place that welcomes innovation. The innovation here is the choice to employ two dozen bunraku-style puppets to help delve into Woody Guthrie's imagination. Standing about forty inches tall and operated by one, two, and sometimes three puppeteers each, the puppets have sculpted faces based heavily on the subjects of WPA photographer Dorothea Lange. The puppets do not represent people from Guthrie's family or his life, but rather are archetypes from his two thousand songs, stories, and poems.
"In our improvisational process, we recognized that the bunraku puppet was uniquely adept at capturing focus for the most subtle of physical actions." says Carter, who was a resident artist at In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre in Minneapolis for five years before coming to Seattle. An original version of This Land, directed by Carter, was first developed in Minneapolis in 1993, and won an award from the Puppeteers of America, and was recently revisited in the guild's Puppetry Journal (Winter 2003).
The puppets in This Land cannot speak, move their eyes, or even open their mouths. Such limitations are actually the puppets' strength as storytellers. The puppets require the audience to slow its process of seeing. They offer simple visual moments in which the observer must fill the emptiness with their other senses. In this way, the puppets claim the audience's attention first, then give it to the musicians who fill the aural space with Woody Guthrie.
The difference between the Minneapolis version and the Seattle version, according to Carter, is simply eleven dramatic years. "We first presented This Land five days before Bill Clinton was inaugurated President. It's remarkable to think what my group of leftist puppeteers were thinking then versus what this group might be thinking now."
"When I first considered revising the play, I was convinced that it was going to be a process of rewriting and improving scenes that either dramatically or musically didn't work so well in the first show. Instead, I found myself inventing whole new ideas for each of Woody's songs. I think that's the enduring quality of Woody Guthrie. His work is so close to who we are and who we aspire to be as a people, that every time you examine it, you have to let the music grow along with you."
In addition to political and social events since 1993, there are also dozens of new Guthrie songs available for This Land through the efforts of Nora Guthrie (Woody's daughter) and a musical collaboration between the British folk singer Billy Bragg and the American rock band Wilco. These artists put new music to unfinished lyrics discovered in the Woody Guthrie Publications archive. Several songs from the popular Bragg/Wilco collaboration Mermaid Avenue are included in the new production.
The other addition to This Land is material specifically chosen to ground Woody Guthrie to the Northwest, where he traveled and wrote extensively. New scenes emphasizing labor justice include images of the General Strike in Seattle in 1919 (the only general strike in any American city in history) and the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999.
Performing This Land are musical director Edd Key (called "a local treasure" by Seattle Weekly, and co-creator of Book-It's Red Ranger Came Calling) and a music, puppetry, and acting ensemble including: Marty Mukhalian (recently in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Theater Schmeater and Red Noses at Open Circle), John Ackermann (Are We Scared? at Open Circle and Awesome! at the Rendezvous Jewel Box), Monique Kleinhans (Caucasian Chalk Circle at theatre simple), Clark Sandford (Cowboys Are My Weakness at Book-It), Kirsten Hopkins, David Taft (Cornish College), Sheila Daniels (Shock Brigades by Baba Yaga Productions), J. Paul Preseault (Wake of the Horse with the Tribes Project), Sprout Guy and Brady Brophy-Hilton (Cornish College's Ladders on the Pearblossom Highway). Puppet design and construction is principally by Paul Chamberlain, Greg Carter, Alison Heimstead, and Jenny Anderson. Costumes are by Ron Erickson and Jenny Anderson. The lighting designer is Craig B. Wollam.
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