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There is a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Hobbes says, "Why are you so bored Calvin?" and Calvin says, "I'm not, I'm just being cool." …… I wrote the play about Woody because we live in an age of hijackers. Within the past few years, a handful of hijackers flew planes into the WTC and the Pentagon, a group of hijackers stole the White House, they hijacked our grief at the loss of our friends and they hijacked the U.S. military and sent them to kill people and die in a desert. They are trying to hijack our democracy and they are going to be stopped. Woody would have recognized this. Woody was not cool. He was not laid back and apathetic. He was not uninterested.
- Michael Patrick Smith, Director, Living Room Company.


IMC: What's the Living Room Company and your relationship to it?

Michael Patrick Smith (MPS): The LRC is a theatre company that I founded in 1997. The idea came about because I was trying to produce my own shows but didn't have any money for a venue. I decided to do a play at my place. The first show was on St. Paul Street in my basement apartment. There were 9 seats pushed up against the wall and the action of the play took place in the living room and kitchen.

The actors warmed up in a neighbor's place and entered thru the front door. We did four shows and only sold out once. It was one of the best experiences of my life. Most theatre is terrible and I don't say that from an elitist standpoint. Most people do not go to see plays. That is a fact and the reason is not that folks are uneducated. The reason is that most plays are condescending and have nothing to do with our life. When you have nine people in a room and two actors are having a fight two feet in front of their face something happens.

Another problem with theatre is the misconception that it needs to compete with the movies. That belief is killing theatre quicker than anything else and it doesn't come from the audience it comes from theatre practitioners. But you can't smell a movie. When a person in your physical space screams or shouts with joy there is a physical reaction that you, being in the room, have to it. That cannot happen in a movie.

So that is what the LRC is about. Eliminating the wall between the audience and the play, creating an active audience and also cultivating a certain "rudeness" in our crowds. Shakespeare's performances where like rock concerts. That is a much more interesting aesthetic than dull theatres that feel like museums. That is more the philosophical base for the company. Right now, we are a non-profit 501(c)3 theatre group and we are working to mount two productions per year. One show in Bmore and one in NYC. A formal board is in place consisting of me, Gregg Shraven, Technical Director, Laura Matteoni Managing Director and Chris Pumphrey our Musical Director.

IMC: What's your background in theater?

MPS: My first role as an actor was playing Ringo Starr in a play about the Beatles when I was a freshman in High School. Both my brothers had dropped out and I was planning on doing the same. If I didn't start acting, I'd have become a criminal. Maybe I should give myself more credit than that but I do think that is basically true. A wonderful teacher I had pushed me very hard. We did plays that most colleges are afraid to touch such as "Buried Child" as well as original plays that Carl Freundel (my teacher) wrote. I polished my skills in college but I learned everything between the ages of 14 and 18. Carl wrote plays and put music in them and directed them. When I was 16 we did a play about the holocaust. The stage was covered in dirt and a barbed wire fence was built between the actors and the audience. This was at a fucking high school. So from that, I started writing music and writing plays. I wrote an adaptation of "Lord of the Rings" as a stage play as well as "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" neither was ever produced. But they are still the types of play ideas that I like. Big things that people say could never be staged. The next play that I'm going to do after "Woody Guthrie Dreams Before Dying" is either going to be a Spaghetti Western or a show about a Ship Captain and his friend who is a Monster Girl. That play involves ship battles and schoolyard slayings.

IMC: What motivated you to do this piece of work on Woody Guthrie?

MPS: I wanted to do something where I could use my writing and my guitar playing and, on a selfish level, I wanted a role that I could wrestle with. I haven't been able to do much real acting since leaving college because I've been on the production end of things. But that is just my selfish reason that I want to be honest about and get out of the way. I could have written a play about Bob Dylan but I didn't. I wrote the play about Woody because we live in an age of hijackers. Within the past few years, a handful of hijackers flew planes into the WTC and the Pentagon, a group of hijackers stole the White House, they hijacked our grief at the loss of our friends and they hijacked the U.S. military and sent them to kill people and die in a desert. They are trying to hijack our democracy and they are going to be stopped. Woody would have recognized this. Woody was not cool. He was not laid back and apathetic. He was not uninterested.

There is a great Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Hobbes says "why are you so bored Calvin?" and Calvin says "I'm not, I'm just being cool." That sums up what I consider to be a virus in this country. Woody put himself out there and sometimes he fucked up. But he didn't stand around and do nothing. He is an example to us. In the play, I don't treat him like a demigod and if anything, as a writer, I'm maybe too hard on him. But it is a person's fallibility that makes them human and one of the underlying themes of the play is that, despite this fallibility, people can still create great change in the world.

IMC: How long has the Woodie Guthrie project been in the works?

MPS: I began thinking about this project in 2001. My play "BOX" was produced in New York City at the Fringe Festival in August of that year. We closed in September and I moved back to Maryland. I had a copy of Woody's biographic novel, Bound For Glory, and I had begun reading that, with a play idea sort of in the back of my mind. After the terrorist attacks, I took the bus back to New York to see some friends. This was less than two weeks after 9/11. Before getting on the bus, I got incredibly stoned and was dealing with some serious paranoia issues, as was everyone at that time, and I brought the book along to keep my mind off things.

Most of the chapters about his early life are very quaint and silly and funny to read, but on the bus, I hit this incredibly sad chapter where Woody deals with the death of his sister and talks about his mother slowly going insane until she is forced into an asylum. This part of the book was especially disturbing in the wake of 9/11. Also, when I was 8 years old, my 16 year old sister, Shanon, was killed in a car accident. Shanon's death, I think, really instilled in me a very keen sense of injustice. And it has defined my life and the way I live it in many many ways. So all this stuff in the book really brought a whole lot of that stuff up. It absolutely ruined my ride up there and I completely shelved the play idea. It hit too close to home for me.

In general, September 11th threw me into a complete creative block. I was unable to get anything done for over 6 months until one night, I was trashed and angry and wrote "Trust the Government," a political satire that we performed in NYC within a year of the attacks. It was one of the scariest performances of my life. Later, I put together a retrospective on the year [2001] at the Creative Alliance called "The Art of War." The piece I wrote and performed in that, "Sunsets" was centered around my experience in NYC two weeks after the shit went down. It was the most difficult thing I have ever written in my life. I broke down crying the day before we performed it and I thanked God that I did because it made it possible for me to get through the show. Working on and crafting "Sunsets" is what really turned me into a writer. I had written things before but that piece made me a writer. So once I got through all that, in September of 2002, I began to reformulate my idea of a play about Woody.

IMC: Once you got back into it, what were the main phases in the process of writing the play?

MPS: First I read Joe Klein's biography, which blew my mind. Guthrie's own book was fun, but full of bullshit, very simplistic. Klein's book showed a much more complicated picture of Woody. From there I outlined his life, cutting it down to about 30 pages or so but then I was at a stand still. My original concept was to visit the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, which houses thousands and thousands of pages of his unreleased writings, get copies of those writings and then use all of Woody's words to construct a one-man play.

I did go to the Archives and had a great time looking through his original material, but for legal reasons, they said I could not use his words. I was sort of back at square one. The thing that had the greatest impact on me at the archives was a framed telegram from Martin Luther King to Pete Seeger, thanking Pete for his work in the Civil Right's Movement and inviting him to join King on the March on Montgomery. That faded, torn telegram really blew my mind. I'd also timed my visit to coincide with the February 15th march in NYC against the invasion of Iraq. Well, some friends and I spent all day walking around police barricades. As anyone who was there can tell you, the city was pulling dirty tricks on citizens there to protest and it was impossible to get to the rally point. My friends and I hit a bar and had some margaritas and watched the rally on TV. We weren't there long when on the TV up steps Pete Seeger in a bright red coat and hat and he starts belting out a song. It was frigid outside and you could see his breath. The sound was turned down so I have no idea what he sung, but the image of this 85, 86 year old man up there, still fighting was incredibly inspiring.

I interviewed Pete Seeger on the phone. Pete Seeger gave me some great info. I barely had to ask a question, he was so quick with the anecdotes and stories and broke into song at the drop of a hat. A song to him is like a noun or a verb, it is simply necessary to sing to communicate. He told me a great story about walking thru the streets of New York years after Woody had died. He described it as a "waking dream" in which Woody walked up to him and Pete said, "What are you doing here, Woody? You are supposed to be in the hospital." and Woody responded, "Naw, that wasn't me. Things weren't going so well with Marj (his second wife) and me so I figured I'd take a little vacation. Spent some time on an island." Pete said "Well, I'm headed over to Harold's (Leventhal) office and then we're going out for some lunch. You wanna come with me Woody?" Woody answered, "Naw, I got something to do. Besides, I'm just a prune-ment of yer imagination." He walked around the corner and disappeared. After getting off the phone with Pete, I found out that I had talked to him on July 14. Woody Guthrie's birthday.



IMC: So, how did you bring this all together?

MPS: There was a point for me in the writing of this that I really totally blanked. I had no idea what to do with the material I had. I didn't know if this was a one-man play or if it had a cast. I didn't know if it spanned years or happened in one night. I didn't know if it was going to be a history of sorts or a fantasy. My original title had been "Woody Guthrie Dreams Before Dying," but at that point, I had abandoned it. I was considering doing a performance about me being unable to write the play, like the movie "Adaptation" or something. I was at a total loss so I scheduled another visit to the WG Archives and spent two more days researching and reading Woody's stuff but I felt very uncomfortable there and awkward and like I was in the way of the people who worked there.

It was a shitty feeling and at the end of the day, I felt defeated as I packed up my stuff to leave. Nora Guthrie was there, she is Woody's daughter and runs the place, but she was very busy and had only talked to me for a moment. She asked me what I was working on and I told her "I'm writing a play about your father and about the folk movement of the 40's" and she kind of gave me a look and an, "Oh yeah?" I'm 28 years old but look a good bit younger, I'm not geeky enough to appear like a real play-write, but I don't dress like a high roller, either so I think she thought I was kind of full of shit. I kept eye contact with her and replied, "I am. I've done it before." She believed me then, said, "Alright," and walked back to her office. Well, at the end of the day, as I mentioned I felt defeated, but I thought, I should say good-bye to Nora so I went into her office and we BSed for a little bit. She told me that Joe Strummer of the Clash had at one point changed his name to Woody and painted "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his electric guitar. I told her that I thought Woody's attitude was much more in line with the punk movement than with the hippie movement for sure.



We continued chatting and at one point she referred to her father as "the trickster" and that really caught my attention. I asked what she meant and it evolved into a discussion of mythology and folklore. She had at one point worked with Joseph Campbell, whose work is a great inspiration to me, and she told me that he had really helped her find a way to put her father in context. Woody is America's leprechaun, coyote, trickster figure. Nora telling me that, I think gave me the permission I needed to write the play. Not formally but just in the sense that I know I haven't written her version of her father's life, I haven't written Pete Seeger's version of Woody's life or Joe Klein's or anybody else’s. I've written my version of Woody's life
and I am proud of that.

IMC: The play will be performed March 26 & 27 at Baltimore’s Creative Alliance.

Creative Alliance 3134 Eastern Avenue, Baltimore MD 21224 (The old Patterson Theater).
410 267-1651
staff-AT-creativealliance.org