When the 20 actors who are about to perform the nine plays and six hours that make up ”The Kentucky Cycle” walk on stage to begin their saga, an immediate wave of eager applause rises from the audience.
They know there`s an epic journey ahead of them: an odyssey of 200 years, from 1775 to 1975, tracing the fortunes of three interrelated families through seven generations as they struggle for supremacy in what the playwright calls the ”dark and bloody land” of eastern Kentucky.
This is American history presented with a grand sweep, moving from the forests of the Indian wars to the battlegrounds of the Civil War to the coal mines of the management-labor conflicts of the 1920s and on up to the union disputes of more immediate times.
But ”The Kentucky Cycle,” which will be holding forth through March 29 here on the thrust stage of the Mark Taper Forum, is not an epic that celebrates the virtues of the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is, rather, a darkling view of a country in which violence, duplicity and greed run rampant; a land crisscrossed with thieves and knaves.
The cycle has its folk heroes, or more precisely its heroines, in the romantic and brave women who rebel against the liars, murderers and profiteers of their male-dominated world. One of the real historical characters who make a guest appearance in the cycle, for example, is Mother Jones, the fiery labor activist who inspires the coal miners to fight for their rights.
And at the end of the cycle, after centuries of pillaging and profiteering, there is a symbolic offering by a member of the last, urbanized generation to reunite with the beauty and wonder of the natural land that his ancestors have exploited and wasted.
But by and large, ”The Kentucky Cycle” paints a gloomy portrait of the American spirit, each of its generations marked by treachery and every one of its plays punctuated by the sounds of death.
Ironically, most audiences are accepting and even embracing this glumly revisionist folk play on the American myth of success.
In Los Angeles, where tickets for the two-part presentation are $75, sales are vigorous and the reception is enthusiastic, as if the play`s descriptions of moral cancer eating away at the country`s spirit jibe perfectly with the self-doubt and self-loathing that afflict so many Americans in these post-Persian Gulf, recessionary times.
As ”The Kentucky Cycle” asserts, repression of the weak, exploitation of the environment and murder of the innocents are patterns of conduct that run throughout the United States` development, and to see them repeated in scene after scene reinforces a curious but powerful view that this nation is now and has always been in a deep, deep slough of violent and cruel behavior. But despite the fury of this activity and the big scale of the plays`
design, ”The Kentucky Cycle” finally does not reach its high ambitions.
It`s a work that`s more melodramatic than tragic in its emotional range and more conventional than revolutionary in its theatrical craftsmanship. It aspires to greatness, but it doesn`t have quite the originality or eloquence to realize its goals as a metaphor for the American experience.
It`s a potent and unique piece of theatergoing, however, one whose own journey toward production makes up almost as epic a tale as the play itself.
A drive in Kentucky
The cycle`s broad philosophical implications actually began with a small incident about eight years ago, when Robert Schenkkan, the playwright, was invited by a friend to accompany him on an automobile trip into the Cumberland territory outside Louisville. There, as Schenkkan relates in his program essay, he saw contrasting scenes of deprivation and abundance that shook him to the roots.
”There was something profoundly disorienting,” he writes, ”about these extremes of poverty and wealth existing so close to one another but without any acknowledged relationship, without any sense of community.
”Even the physical landscape seemed to embody this social contradiction. It was, at one and the same time, some of the most beautiful mountain scenery in the country and some of the most devastated.
”There were lush mountain forests full of oak and flowering dogwood and azalea, and then you`d turn the corner and the other side of the mountain would have been strip mined-all vegetation long since bulldozed away, the fertile topsoil buried under a slag heap of crushed rock, and mine tailings so heavily sulfurous that they literally leached a mild form of sulphric acid when it rained. I was astounded and outraged. What had happened here? How could this be?”
Soon after his first encounter with this Appalachia, Schenkkan, having read several histories of the region, wrote a short play about the territory and its people as a wedding gift to his wife, Mary Anne.
Titled ”Tall Tales,” in which a spirited mountain girl`s family is conned out of the mineral rights to its land by a smooth-talking agent of Eastern coal operators, the play eventually became the sixth of the nine plays Schenkkan developed over the next five years in workshops and readings at several not-for-profit theaters.
Warner Shook, a director active in both stage and television, became the project`s director as it moved along; and last season, with the aid of a $125,000 grant from the Fund for New American Plays, the full cycle was produced (for about $700,000) at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle.
Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where the cycle had been through an early workshop, saw the show in Seattle and arranged to have the expensive project brought to Los Angeles, with most of the cast intact, as centerpiece of the Forum`s 25th anniversary season.
Generations of tyranny
As Schenkkan`s cycle expanded, the Rowen family, which had been featured in ”Tall Tales,” became a uniting thread of the complete cycle, beginning in 1775, when Michael Owen, a murdering rogue and runaway indentured servant, grabs the land from the Cherokees and then brutally subjugates and marries an Indian woman who gives him two children, a son, Patrick, whom he scorns, and a daughter whom he leaves to die in the wilderness as a thing of no earthly value to him. Prospering in his rich farmland, Michael Owen also buys a slave woman, by whom he sires another, black son.
Patrick, grown to manhood and goaded by his hate-filled mother, kills his father, marries a neighboring mountain woman (whose father he also murders), and drives out his mother from their home. Years later, he in turn is cheated of his land, reduced to sharecropping status by Jeremiah Talbert, the vengeful son of his late wife`s father, and forced to sell all his possessions, including the slave who is his half-brother.
But Patrick`s Bible-spouting son Ezekiel plots his own revenge, and during the Civil War, Ezekiel`s son Jed, who joins up with the marauding Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill, murders Jeremiah and most of the rest of the Talbert family to reclaim the land for the Owens.
This takes us up to the end of the first half of the cycle.
The second and lesser part of the cycle focuses on the mining era in the land`s history, climaxing with the bloody struggles of 1920 between the miners and the coal operators and then bitterly commenting on a collusive deal-making alliance in the 1950s among management, union and black power capitalists.
With its continuing stories of family blood feuds, its wide range of characters and its intricately arranged plotting in a two-part panorama, ”The Kentucky Cycle” has been compared in scope to Greek tragedy and, of course, to the milestone production of Charles Dickens` ”Nicholas Nickleby” staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980.
Roots include `Roots`
There are other, more recent similarities. The incidents in the miners strike segment are reminiscent of John Sayles film ”Matewan,” which also focused on a painful betrayal within the ranks; and the theatrical style of that same playlet, with its dependence on live folk music and communal spirit, recalls the techniques used by director Frank Galati in his adaptation for Steppenwolf Theatre of John Steinbeck`s ”The Grapes of Wrath.”
The cycle`s most obvious antecedent, however, is the television mini-series, as epitomized by such big and successful projects as ”Rich Man, Poor Man” and ”Roots,” in which major and enduring societal issues were dealt with through skillfully handled episodes of melodrama.
Schenkkan, 38, an actor (and a fine, intelligent one) before he became a playwright, has created big, broad, playable scenes for the ensemble, and in several instances he has written arias of eloquence for key players in his saga.
But in such scenes as those in which a hard-driving union leader`s pathetic, drunken wife tries to persuade him to come home to her (”When was the last time you called me Maggie?” she asks him as she staggers off stage), he falls back on threadbare, B-movie cliches to puff out the action.
What helps raise the plays above their TV conventions and frayed situations is their performance in the arena of live theater.
There`s an undeniable rush of excitement in such an enterprise: the chance to see the actors in the ensemble stretch themselves in a variety of roles and the fascination of watching a long and complicated story line unfold in the here-and-now environment of theater.
Not all the actors so passionately involved in the action are up to the demands of their roles, but it is truly thrilling to see someone like Charles Hallahan, a yeoman actor in films and television, take on key roles in the cycle with the power and finesse of a star.
In addition to presenting a parade of acting opportunities, Schenkkan and director Shook have made inventive use of the theater`s physical resources. Avoiding spectacle, they concentrate the action on a raked wooden stage, bare except for scaffolding on either side of the central playing area.
The actors, when not performing, retire to church pews arranged on each side of the stage, as if they, too, are watching the stories in common with the audience.
The production opens with the middle of the stage filled with a large patch of Earth, representing the primitive land. As the frontier gradually gives way to modern industrial times, the Earth is covered over by wooden planks until there is no land left.
Only at the end, in the poignant reunion of the Owen family with its heritage, does a small section of Earth reappear, as a grave of a long-dead ancestor. (Schenkkan also cleverly employs a small prop, a musical watch that is handed down from generation to generation, and from play to play.)
`P.C.` patchwork
Ultimately, however, ”The Kentucky Cycle” is a bold and imposing tapestry fashioned of shreds and patches. Beginning with rip-roaring excitement, it falters in its later stages, borrowing from better sources and embroidering its story with liberal, politically correct attitudes that often seem more formulaic than deeply felt.
For its playwright and cast, it`s undoubtedly a landmark achievement, one that is bound to impress audiences in Los Angeles and in the future engagements it appears destined to enjoy.
But it`s skillful rather than artful, and despite the high emotions and furious activity it summons up, it is a curiously undemanding and unmoving experience.
As an event, ”The Kentucky Cycle” is remarkable in the territory it covers; but as drama, it`s an uneven and patchy landscape.
