Woody Guthrie Dreams, written by and starring Michael Patrick Flanagan Smith, is a hodge-podge of style, emphasis and capability of the performers. As Smith and others narrate Guthrie's life, the show begins with a surreal, expressionistic representation of capitalism with people in black, wearing derbies, smoking cigars. It soon veers away from this style.
I knew Woody Guthrie (met him when I studied dance with his wife, Marjorie Mazzia). I introduced Ramblin' Jack Elliot to him and sat in Woody's living room listening to the two of them play and sing "I Be Goody if You Will Buy Me a Rubber Dolly," Jack on guitar, Woody on mandolin, over and over for 45 minutes. Woody had a tone, a quiet solidity without large physical gestures. Smith doesn't have the tone or the gesture. But that's okay; we don't necessarily have to have perfect authenticity in a biographical play. But this production has two major problems: the "hodge" in the "podge" is the insertion of the extraneous -- like two sequences of Joseph Stalin spouting (because Woody was a communist), Jesus appearing as Pete Seeger, and an imagined Will Rogers. And the main problem: too much expanded biography and not enough of why we came to see the show Woody's songs. Caleb Stine sings well as Cisco Houston and so does Ben Curtis as Pete, but, although the songs in the show do stand, Smith, as Woody, sings flat, in a rough voice, with an unrestrained physicality. Actually, I'd like to see Stine try the part-- his singing tone most matched Woody's. A trio of lovely dancers is inserted-- a high point of the show-- and that's where Woody meets his second wife (Jennifer Restivo is excellent as Marjorie.) There is a boring courtship story about a rat and lots of "Acting"- showing emotion rather than feeling it -- simple statements with words that are moving are gratingly shouted out with throat-tearing intensity. The unrestrained men here have a sense of Performing rather than Being, and that works only near the end when the madness of Huntington's Disease take possession of Woody. The play has some charming domestic moments and some tragic ones, and, with some judicious trimming, like the sequences mentioned above and the philosophizing near the end, is basically better than most of the performances.
