The chain saw is your friend

Writing about my Guthrie show below, I'm reminded of the months of creation. I already knew all the songs, so I focused on reading all of Guthrie's journals and selecting passages I liked. I copied them and started stacking them in piles by subject matter; at one point, my apartment living room floor had about two dozen piles one had to navigate to get around. For weeks I stepped over piles of paper.

When I finally "edited" the material, organized it, and added appropriate songs, I had a show that was too long: about three hours! I figured I'd edit it again to two acts, about two hours.

Then a serendipitous moment happened.

I saw a one-act play an actor had put together on Jack Kerouac. It was a wonderful show: except it was much too long. Kerouac, like Guthrie, sings the same tune most of the time, and this play was two acts, two hours, and it was too much of a good thing. I left the theater determined to edit my show down to an hour.

This may have been the hardest editing chore I ever did. But it was worth it. An hour was perfect. Moreover, it had a modular construction, so actually I could vary the show from an hour down, which came in handy when I got a grant to take it to schools. Teachers could select the subject matter they wanted.

Here's a link to an audio of the show, this in its last incarnation with a second musician, the late Jim Wylie.

P.S. It's almost a fluke this show even got created. I wanted to get a grant to write a new play. But the Metropolitan Arts Commission, to which I wanted to apply, did not give grants for as solitary an act as "writing." I learned from a poet who had gotten a grant that, in theory, the grant was for giving readings, not writing, but he actually wrote the poems living on the grant, then gave free readings to satisfy the conditions of the grant.

Well, the trouble with this strategy was that I'd have to share the grant with actors and a director! Then a friend said, Do a one-man show, there's a natural one for you. Never in a zillion years would I have thought of Woody Guthrie: a big guy portraying a skinny Okie? Call it a tribute, not an impersonation, my friend suggested. Eureka!

So that's how the show happened. It's the most successful grant project I ever wrote, renewed several times and living on for years beyond the grant support as word of mouth spread and bookings came in without my having to market it at all. I resurrected it twice after a silence, the last time with Wylie some years before he died. I believe the last performance was at the Newport Performing Arts Center on the coast. The first was a quarter century earlier, in a big tent at Portland's Artquake. It was quite a ride!

(Now and again I consider resurrecting it yet again but it would take so much work to get my chops back that I finally admit that my performing days are over.)