Bluegrass Saga

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III/WASHINGTON

DURING THE DECADE IN WHICH HE taught himself to be a playwright, actor Robert Schenkkan, 40, went long stretches without work, uprooted himself from New York to California, grew politically inflamed and endured the deaths of his mother and, especially agonizing, his stillborn first child. "We lost a lot of friends because of their inability to deal with our grief," he recalls. "They seemed to think we should be quiet and move on. But I look at the whole world through that lens now, and it gave me the theme of denial, of misguided forgetting, that runs through my work." The image of a dead or lost child became the leitmotiv of The Kentucky Cycle, his epic cycle of nine playlets, which seeks to tell the whole history of the U.S. through the lives of seven generations of three intertwined families living in the Cumberland region of Kentucky. The work is a bloodbath of family conflict and betrayal -- fathers killing sons, sons killing fathers, husbands brutalizing wives, wives engineering the death of husbands. The most recurrent image is of a child dying: it appears in six of the nine episodes.

The Kentucky Cycle won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in drama -- the first work ever to do so without being staged in New York City. Normally, the award brings box-office wealth and a clamor of producers seeking one's next work. But everything about this show is unusual: its length, its two-century sweep, its sprawling blend of domestic cruelty and historical revisionism. As a commercial venture, it is also daunting for its cast of 20 and the need to induce audiences to commit to two three-hour sessions. So it has taken nearly a year and a half to reach New York.

And it's not quite there yet. A somewhat recast, restaged and even rewritten version started previews last week at Washington's Kennedy Center, to standing ovations, but will not arrive on Broadway until late November. There it faces a tough fight. Ticket buyers may balk at the $100 top price for the two shows. Critics may stress the unsubtle, almost cartoonish nature of some of the characters and acting, rather than focus on the mounting and ultimately overwhelming power of the narrative. Even if everyone lauds the show, it may share the fate of the 1990 Tony Award-winning adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which sounded so depressing that audiences stayed away.

The first five playlets embrace 90 years from the Revolution to the Civil War, during which the families stave off outside forces and live independently. The second half concerns the coming of coal mining and company towns, the rise and decline of the union movement, the exhaustion of the old industrial base and the redemptive efforts of the environmental movement -- all outside forces that the locals are helpless to resist. The rhetoric begins with assertions of rampant individual freedom and evolves into a more mature recognition of individual responsibility.

The wellspring character is a frontiersman braving the woods in search of fortune. He is resourceful, intrepid, quick-witted -- and amoral, fierce and treacherous. He murders white men, poisons Indians and buys a black woman to "breed" with so that he can enslave his own children by her. In an epic saga of a black family, a white one and one mixed white and Cherokee, he is the founding father of all three. Stacy Keach embodies him in his rage and stink and invaluable vitality. Only three later characters linger so forcefully in memory. One, a pragmatic and world-weary union leader, is also played by Keach. The others, a sharecropper who uses the Civil War to settle personal grudges and a lie-spinning huckster for coal companies in the 1890s, are played by Jacob Milligan and Gregory Itzin. These actors, but few others, achieve Schenkkan's goal of humanizing the struggles and sins that shaped the modern world.

The Kentucky Cycle epitomizes the attempt of a new generation to divert the American theater from decades of preoccupation with intimate domestic drama and reclaim a broad political landscape in the manner of Elmer Rice and Clifford Odets. Schenkkan dates his hortatory anger to a visit in 1981 to the Cumberland, where he "smelled the poverty of the mountains -- as though you had taken a corn-shuck mattress, soaked it in urine, covered it with garbage and coal and set it on fire." He insists that The Kentucky Cycle is not negative but hopeful: "What we have done, we can undo, if only we are ready to admit that we have done it."

The final play, full of poetry and free of preachment, ends with the discovery of yet another dead child, the corpse of an infant slain nearly two centuries before. The symbolism is potent and the sense of completion is profound -- not least because Keach, who plays the murderer, now plays the great-great-great-grandson who unearths and cradles the defiled bones. Schenkkan says he wrote this playlet in a single day, in a cathartic tribute to his own lost son. Whatever the ups and downs that came before, this was clearly a day when he did everything right.