Reviews: "The Kentucky Cycle" Spins Itself Out

Let it be clear: the frustration prompted by “The Kentucky Cycle” stems from the playwright's work, not this particular theatrical production itself. It is easy to assume that a Pulitzer brings with it a certain guarantee of quality statesmanship, but the play struggled even during its 33 performances on Broadway in 1993. At the time, New York Times critic Frank Rich noted that he was unable to find in the work “either one startling insight into American history, one original turn of phrase, one novel theatrical moment or one character of tragic size who is deeply moving as an original rather than a generic representative of some sociopolitical development.” Instead, he found a “melodramatic pageant.”

The work presents a Schenkkan yin and yang: a massive creative appetite rivaled perhaps only by his penchant for verbosity. The source material cries loudly for the keen eye of a sharp editor; an audience would benefit greatly from a less specificity, more plot movement in a work that spans 1775 to 1975. By the time the playwright dives into the struggle for 1920s mining unions in the first one-act of Part 2, the audience is still too fatigued from surviving the Civil War to fully commit to the highly detailed text.

Amazing, amid all this, is that Schenkkan manages to give his audience the basic premise of his Kentuckian “Iliad” within the first fifteen minutes of the first play. Michael Rowen (Michael Steven Costello, who undertakes multiple roles over the course of the cycle, as do his colleagues) claims from the Cherokee a parcel of farming land in what will later become the mining hills of Howsen County, Kentucky. With the land comes a warning: as long as people dwell on those lands, their lives will be mired in sorrow.

The Rowen, Talbert, and Biggs families never leave Howsen County, not for long. Some travel away for a time - times of war - but they always come back, bound to the land and to their familial ties. The warning proves accurate: all those linked to the land come to be tortured by it.

For a theatre company (or, in this case, two), such material provides opportunity to showcase part of the human spectrum: sorrow, mental anguish brought repeatedly to the brink of collapse, and determination fueled not by hope, but the realization that things are simply incapable of falling to further ruin. Families are fractured, guns are drawn, blood is shed. To deliver these successive blows over the course of the cycle’s historic arc, each member of the cast is required to tackle extensive material and the process of giving each of their multiple roles context and a sense of singularity. Seeing how director (and scenic director, and Zeitgeist Stage Artistic Director) David J. Miller and his cast have navigated these emotional minefields is to witness some truly fine moments of theatricality.

Particularly notable within this large cast (one perhaps even slightly too large for the space it occupied) are Peter Brown, who gives three generations of Rowen patriarchs (Patrick, Ezekiel, and Joshua) a teeth-gritting determination even in the face of defeat; Christine Power, whose Mary Anne Rowen has seen the world of her youth destroyed but still slams her adult feel down in defiance; Greg Maraoi, whose Jeremiah Talbert breaks down a man shortly before his Abe Steinman is required to build others back up; and Cheryl Singleton, who transforms from a terrified slave into the confident and warm Lana Toller. These performances, and those of the rest of the cast, truly are worthy of full houses.

But these actors would be served just as well by other parts in other plays. So why “The Kentucky Cycle?” Because it has, from inception, been a work seemingly cast into the ranks of “Angels in America?” In order to prove that two fringe theatre companies can bring to 2007 Boston tales from a Kentucky more than 225 years ago? To test the Boston arts community on its willingness to truly commit a full day, or two full evenings, to a single work?

“The Kentucky Cycle” offers no answers. It instead inflicts a treatment described by one of its characters - it reduces an audience member until there's nothing left but edge.