TV Reviews : Cather’s ‘O Pioneers!’ on ‘American Playhouse’

“American Playhouse,” which aired an estimable “Grapes of Wrath” in March, has staged another epic American novel about the myth and spirit of the land and the sodbusters who pioneered it.

Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers!” (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28, and at 9 p.m. Friday on KPBS Channel 15) is an artful stage dramatization, with music, of the 1913 novel about a woman’s indomitable will forging a destiny on the Great Divide in turn-of-the-century Nebraska.

The production features a sterling performance by Mary McDonnell (Oscar-nominated for “Dances With Wolves”) as the Swedish immigrant farm woman Alexandra Bergson, one of American literature’s strongest female characters and inspired by Cather’s own girlhood growing up on the plains of Nebraska.

Not many people have read “O Pioneers!” and this two-hour show, its stiff musical interludes notwithstanding, is an impressive introduction to a classic story of the American heartland. Cather (1873-1947) was emblematic of the outspoken, iconoclastic New Woman American writers early in the century (her contemporaries included Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow and the young Gertrude Stein).

Huge cycloramas and a bare stage are used inventively by director Kirk Browning (lensing the production first staged last year by Kevin Kuhlke for the Huntington Theatre Company at Boston University).

A word of caution: The show’s introductory chorale is off-putting and bloodless but at least it’s brief. Once the family drama begins with the father’s death and the heroine’s struggle to keep her greedy siblings in line and make a success of the failing homestead, the story (including lust and murder) unfolds with a measured grace and credible Swedish accents in Darrah Cloud’s adaptation.

What’s unsuccessfully left to the imagination is the evocation of the shimmering land, the fields of grass and the dry prairies. The land was also stage-bound in “American Playhouse’s” “Grapes of Wrath” (also helmed by Browning), but “Wrath” compensated with a more identifiable story.

Meanwhile, along with an affectionate supporting role by Neil Maffin as a younger brother and an elusive love interest attractively played by Randle Mell (McDonnell’s real-life husband), we do have a pre-industrial New Woman here. That should be enough to send viewers to the library to check out the real Willa Cather.