Arlo Guthrie’s “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” is a comic monologue in song form — about a 1965 Thanksgiving, a traffic arrest for littering, and the particular absurdity of American bureaucracy at its most petty. That it became an anti-establishment anthem says something about Guthrie’s gift for finding the parable inside the ordinary story. Decades of touring have since ended. He announced his retirement in October 2020 after almost sixty years of shows, but the stories haven’t stopped. On Saturday, October 17, Guthrie sits down at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington for an intimate, unscripted conversation with journalist Laura Mars, billed as “a candid look into the life of a national treasure in folk music history.”
About the Show
The Guthrie Center presents this evening as a singular fundraiser, with proceeds benefiting the community programs Arlo founded in Great Barrington in 1991, a nonprofit that has grown to offer everything from a weekly community lunch to a musical instrument lending library. The son of Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Mazia Guthrie, a dancer who performed with the Martha Graham Company, Arlo grew up in a household where Pete Seeger came around and folk music was less a genre than a way of understanding the world. He made his stage debut at thirteen. By nineteen, “The Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” had debuted at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, earned a Grammy nomination, and established him as a natural-born storyteller in the tradition his father helped define.
This evening follows a format Guthrie established during his 2022–2023 East Coast appearances: an unscripted exchange, “unrehearsed, and under no illusions but his own,” along with rarely seen video footage and audience Q&A. That tour paired him with Grammy Museum Executive Director Bob Santelli; this October, the conversation partner is journalist Laura Mars. Guthrie stepped back from guitar performance citing health challenges. He told Berkshire Magazine he was “losing the ability to perform at the standard to which I had become accustomed,” but a man who built his reputation on decades of stage banter and who collaborated with Pete Seeger for over forty years is not done being heard.
Venue & Logistics
The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center sits on Castle Street in Great Barrington, which is, for anyone who knows Arlo Guthrie’s story, the right zip code. He has made his home in Washington, MA since the late 1960s, and The Guthrie Center operates from Great Barrington. For listeners across the broader Hudson Valley region, Great Barrington is a short drive east into the Berkshires. The 681-seat theater gives the evening the proportions a conversation deserves. The show begins at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets
Tickets run $40 Reserved, $80 Preferred, and $150 Premium (prices exclude processing fees). Public tickets go on sale Wednesday, September 2 at noon; Mahaiwe members had first access starting August 26. The venue notes the event is expected to sell out quickly. Buy tickets