Folk, y’all

Woody Guthrie’s American Song possesses one tremendous asset—a great songbook, with titles including “Oklahoma Hills,” “Union Maid” and “This Land Is Your Land.” Adapter Peter Glazer has constructed the show so that these songs are almost constantly the central focus.

This is no docudrama. Sure, episodes of American Song illuminate aspects of Guthrie’s life—he was driven out of Oklahoma by the Dust Bowl and traveled from state to state by sneaking onto freight trains, singing at labor camps and shanty towns and later working at bars in New York—but don’t expect a heroic portrait.

Instead, Guthrie is prismatically represented by three different people onstage, identified—only in the program—as the searcher (Zack Sapunor), the folk singer (Jeremiah Lowder) and the writer (Lew Rooker). They’re as much commentators as protagonists, who portray Guthrie as an acute observer who gathered words, melodies, personalities and issues as he drifted through America’s underbelly—during the Depression.

The meat of the show emerges in the music and lyrics, presented in ensemble style by a cast of 14. They portray a kaleidoscopic array of largely unnamed characters representing folks Guthrie encountered, including migratory Dust Bowl emitters who ended up shuttling around California, Arizona and Oregon to pick fruit and vegetables (jobs soon filled by Mexican “guest workers,” as described in the sorrowful song “Deportee").

Guthrie’s songs are very different from current pop: they were intended to be borrowed, internalized and then sung again, preferably en masse at a community gathering, and it really doesn’t matter if you don’t have a trained voice.

This is probably why the songs work so effectively in this show, which features a community cast, some of whom aren’t perfect singers. Musical director Jesse Valerio very intelligently avoids microphones and restrains both the tempo and volume of his band rather than push the cast further than it can go. In this sense, the show moves at a leisurely pace.

Director Luther Hanson paints a tableau—a scene in a freight car, another in a labor camp and a union-organizing tune sung in a bar. It’s not a plot-driven, linear show. A few connective segments feel slightly posed, but Hanson’s understated visuals serve Guthrie’s songs admirably.

Finally, Nichole Sivell deserves a word of appreciation for her costumes, which range from Oklahoma frontier clothing to urban garb of the 1940s.