welcome to a taste of theater where everyone is a stop this is the place where playwrights from around the country will come to showcase one scene of their today's star is shining bright on randy nugent of new york new york and i'm from i'm from indiana but i've been your for twenty five years and i just wrote this so hard traveling with woody for the french festival in new york city in two thousand and eleven and it was so fun and the reviews were good and it has legs so i've been playing it now all over the country that's amazing two years so tell me how did you come up with the concept for this show  i was looking for a one man show i used to do a hank williams play called lost highway where i discovered that it is three times as fun to be on stage if you're playing music with a band and so i began looking for what what what artists could i cover besides hank because hank died at twenty nine and i see i started growing out of that role so i found woody guthrie a friend of mine turned me on to his biography bound for glory it turns out he has leftist politics which i share and his songs you know bob dylan talks about woody as being his initial he minnesota to come to new york looking for woody guthrie bruce springsteen talks about woody all of them most of my favorite singer songwriters were influenced by woody guthrie who was really the first alternative singer songwriter really so i began looking at his songs reading his books he has a lot of great humor so that's helpful in a one man show and it turns out that he was a union rabble rouser he played for unions with pete seeger and will gear who play grandpa on the waltons but will gear used to be of a you union advocate and so it turns out that he i could be doing a one man show about woody guthrie would allow me to say what i really feel using woody to do it and since it unions are still a question in this  country there's a lot of controversy about whether they're good whether they're bad and i know i am for unions not that they're perfect but they certainly got us our eight hour day in our weekends and they got fair hours for it's a subject matter that i care about and that i can also make an interesting show about so i learned to play the harmonica i already did play the guitar and turns out woody songs had a certain trajectory oklahoma hills for instance is about where he was born and hard travelin is about all the workers that came to his town looking for work and during the depression and bound for glory is a train song it's about traveling  to california after the dust storm when he had to find work there was nothing to do in oklahoma so he went to california so a lot of his songs the songs tell the story so i only have to write a little things from w and also i have to embellish and write my own things too to make bridges between the songs but my shows set it at a union meeting for steelworkers that are striking for safe mines and a living wage and so it's a he was called to the saint of the working man to the poet of the people and i had done some steinbeck before i did of mice and men as an actor and i i loved talking that could truthfully portray who said all the things that i really do believe to so quickly after people watch or play was it that you want them to walk away with  like the loot and walk away with a respect for the working men and a respect for the union that protects them and gives them wages and safe working conditions and you know health plans and and so it's it's a little bit propaganda it's a little bit of preaching not preachy but preaching and i would love to do the show in ohio and wisconsin and the places where the unions are being weakened by certain politicians and so we another vote always comes around in four years and i would like to do my show for young people people who don't quite understand unions right now who believe that what they hear on the news right so i wouldn't mind helping the cause and being an activist too in my art form i would know five or six other places i went to the university of iowa their play reading program and so i've written a play called you can't trust the mail it's published a play called unbeatable herald which was made travel and show dot com where you can find out more about that so it runs from the sixty minute there's a sixty minute version here for the fridge there's also a seventy five minute version it has projections i use  video and slides to accentuate what i'm talking about so it's there's some spectacle to the show too and i like to play for unions in any event really you know i play for a for a retirement community any communities that play in libraries i play for high schools and colleges so if i'm available anywhere where anybody wants to hear more about w used to find out more about this show and my other plays and i'm just an actor too i did a board walk empire last year and i'm doing plays and television and film and i'm trying to do and san antonio and touring canada in november that is balance right the play keeps changing i keep finding out from different audiences as i roll along you know i need this and once i had a projections i had to rewrite because i wanted to talk about more of w y's art but part of the projections are what he was a great would say a great painter rar but he had great enthusiasm and he loved it and i wanted to show people what his art was  so that changed it so the hard thing is is finding out how much you can tell you would he has such drama in his life that i could not fit into myself because  not enough people know about him i know up until i started writing this so i didn't know very much about him except that he wrote this land is your ad that's i didn't know right right that's that's sometimes the limit of what people know about him but so the hardest thing was you know letting go of being able to tell everything because you can't and what was some of the research that you did you know to try and relate it to show because and people call it a little bit novelized there's a little bit of fiction to it i suppose but bound for glory is his autobiography he also wrote a column called what he says  i did find a book that was a collection of those articles that he wrote and part little political cartoons and he wrote other books too i think they just found out i just read a johnny depp is also woody lover and he has had something to do with funding and unpublished books that would he never found a publisher for it during his life but would but johnny is helping that become available to people  black musicians get that they were trying to get white audiences to listen to black music and when he was at peekskill when paul robeson tried to play there and there was a riot and so what he  back so what was the easiest part of writing the show because consider it's a one man show it's it's a challenge to to mean it entertaining with just one person wrote you can find all the lyrics you can find lots of history there his his son arlo guthrie is still playing around and that's easy to find  also what was very simple was just deciding what song should i use you know they just popped out because he did write three thousand songs and they said many of them and he would he never got around to putting music to you so they've asked billy bragg and jackson browne and other artists wilco to to write music to some of his lyrics last year was his one hundredth anniversary of his birthday so there were many many festivals and celebrations they did a celebration at the kennedy center so there's a village out there that still loves and keeps woody alive who keeps his ideas and thoughts and music alive so what was easy was that he's everywhere if you start looking for him yeah and also this land is your land is was a very public that i remember that as a kid i sure there are some some verses to that song that they usually didn't put in your fifth grade music book which would be what he was not just being gone the whole patriotic with that song he was also being critical of america there's a there's a verse in that song in the squares of the city in the shadow of  by the relief office i saw my people and as they stood there hungry i stood there wondering is this land made for you and me he he has some questions about america in fact that song was written as a response the reason i say he's an alternative songwriter kate smith's god bless america was one of the most popular songs in america in one nine hundred forty and when woody heard that  he he hated it because he'd the america that would he know he would that would he knew was not very god blessed at that time so this land is your land was written and it was originally called  god blessed america it was a response an alternative version of of a song about america and  song about america so that song is often just thought of as almost like the star spangled banner but but it is it has it critical verses to what is it you want if there's one thing that you want people to know about randy in years what would that be guess i'm just glad that i have the sense to respect the right people and woody is a man worthy of our respect and our work and i like to use my work i feel a lot of one man shows are about the actor a lot of actors just have a story to tell and i think that's fine i wish i thought i had a story that was interesting enough to tell but i i personally would would rather keep from navel gazing too much and so i'm proud of the fact that that my heroes are the right people that's very that's very well and if you've been in the business now i guess seventeen years old and you went to play writing school and what is it that you would want to up and coming playwrights to you to learn from as a result of your best years of experience i would say get your stuff down on paper and then get actors together and have a and formal reading i think the playwright learns more from more than from critics and from people telling you what your play is reactions from audience and things like that i always find that i learn so much by just hearing what i wrote being said by other people in front of some little audience even five people because there's just something you you realize so quickly about whether it's clear whether you've gone on too long you can just sense it even if they're not laughing or fidgeting in the audience i think there's there's something about it being in the public and in other people's mouths with that interaction you know that the characters in the audience what's going on between those people and a young player writes can i think learn the biggest chunk of what they need to know by just witnessing what you've written being presented in front of some some stranger some people who don't know the show already and also you know fail and fail and fail and keep going back you know it's  that's right and what's great about the writing is the grammar sometimes doesn't matter because the writer which of who we write how people talk not how people write and and so what i always loved by play writing was th i tried to talk him out of it woodrow wilson guthrie which is too much of a name for a country boy so i sawed off all the fancy work and just left would if i could remember that many now i don't claim to be nothing fancy your own damn here's just as good as mine i got a one cylinder brain all i know is we all got to stick together this country will never get much better as long as it's dog eat