Metaphor for America : Robert Schenkkan’s ‘Kentucky Cycle’ is a 9-play, 6 1/2-hour saga of families caught up in Indian wars, land feuds and union clashes

Robert Schenkkan seems to be a pack rat, judging by a glance of the study in his Van Nuys home. The room isn’t just full of books and paper, but trinkets and bric-a-brac from floor to ceiling.

A closer look, though, reveals that what really surrounds Schenkkan in his workroom are icons and signs that point the way to the heart of the massive, nine-play, 6 1/2-hour theatrical saga that has consumed five years of his life.

On one wall hang swords and other war heirlooms of Schenkkan’s grandfather. On a bookshelf is a framed, darkly ironic motto: “Forgive Your Enemies . . . but Don’t Forget Their Names.”

And adorning the wall behind Schenkkan’s computer is a multicolored, patchwork quilt. Made by his friend, Los Angeles quilter Lulie Sabella, it depicts key images from Schenkkan’s epic play, “The Kentucky Cycle,” opening today at the Mark Taper Forum.

At the quilt’s center is a mighty oak with branches arching to the sky above the land grabbed by the play’s Rowen family from the Cherokee people in the Cumberland Plateau region of eastern Kentucky. Cyclically swirling around the oak are farmers working the land, the Civil War, violent feuds between Cumberland folk, mining operations tearing apart the hills and the rise of the United Mine Workers.

These signposts in the playwright’s lair also point to the phrase that hovers over the “Cycle” like Damocles’ sword, one that Schenkkan used as the original title of Play 1: “A Dark and Bloody Land.”

It’s a phrase that haunts any conversation about his play, especially when Schenkkan or his director, Warner Shook, insist that the biggest mistake anyone can make about “The Kentucky Cycle” is to assume that it’s just about Kentucky from 1775 to 1975.

“This could just as easily be called ‘The California Cycle,’ ” Shook suggests. “It’s not about hillbillies. It’s a reflection of the state of the union.”

The “Cycle” does track--through the stories of the Irish-American Rowen and Talbert families and the African-American Biggs family--the blood-drenched history of Kentucky’s Cumberlands: the ruthless Indian Wars, the land robberies by speculators, the spectacular feuds made infamous by the Hatfields vs. the McCoys, the takeover by mining companies leading to violent union clashes, union victories and defeats and the ecological destruction of the region.

But for Schenkkan, when the Cumberlands’ violent past is placed alongside the dangerous streets of today’s American cities, “it’s peanuts. It’s as if eastern Kentucky endured in an earlier time what we’re experiencing now in L.A. or Chicago or New York. This is the quintessential American story.

“We need to think about why Eldridge Cleaver was right when he said, ‘Violence is as American as apple pie.’ Is our violent tendency something we’re prepared to accept as the cost of doing business, as the price you pay for being an American? If, after profound thought and introspection, we as a society decide that it is, that’s one thing. But if it’s a case of the violence just being there with everybody in denial about it, well, that’s something else.”

Contrary to the suggestion that the “Cycle” is your basic sweeping family saga, theater’s answer, say, to the TV miniseries, Schenkkan says frankly that he’s serving up “revisionist history.”

“But I think it’s more accurate to say that the ‘Cycle’ is a re-examination of our core national mythology than to say it’s a critique of the system. Systems come and go, but myths always inform. And if a society’s myths are no longer functioning in a healthy way--and our American macho, frontier, laissez-faire myths are certainly used up, along with the land--then we have to ask ourselves, ‘Why?’ ”

Schenkkan peppers his conversation with such Big Questions, which naturally stem from the show’s narrative and historical enormity. Fittingly, it’s also the Big Play of the regional theater season (its $125,000 grant from the Fund for New American Plays is the largest ever given by that endowment). An ensemble of 13 actors performs 72 roles in both two-night sequences and marathon one-day performances of the entire play. The demands imposed by the production at its summer 1991 world premiere at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre nearly overwhelmed that modestly funded theater’s technical facilities--and is pressing those at the Taper.

For its part, the Taper is proclaiming the show as “the centerpiece” of its 25th anniversary season. After Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson saw the Intiman production, he hurriedly added the “Cycle” to the season. Critics are expected to fly in from across the country for the opening. Although Taper managing director Charles Dillingham is not disclosing the theater’s production budget for the “Cycle,” he notes that the figure is “under $1 million.” (The Intiman staging cost $700,000.)

Depending on critical and public response, the production may move--to Washington’s Kennedy Center (which has a production option), to Broadway, perhaps to London.

But why nine plays? Schenkkan’s usual response is: “Hey, I didn’t plan it that way. It just sort of happened.”

Nevertheless, Bigness is emphatically not the driving aesthetic behind the staging concept that Schenkkan and Shook have developed over the last two years of workshops at the Taper’s New Works festival, the Sundance Playwrights Institute, TheatreWorks in Colorado, and readings at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. (Before Shook entered the project, Schenkkan collaborated with director Scott Reiniger in workshop productions at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Taper Too.)

Rolling his eyes, Shook moans, “I know that someone down the road is going to stage this with all sorts of ridiculous spectacle. But we’re going the opposite way. It begins with the idea that the power of this play is an actor speaking in the light.”

Adopting story theater techniques involving minimal set design and costume changes as well as a cast remaining on stage throughout the performance, Shook has instilled in the cast the simple, difficult idea of “just acting it,” comments ensemble member Lillian Garrett-Groag. The actress, whose range of “Cycle” roles--from a wily Cherokee wife to labor leader Mother Jones--suggested to her some major makeup work, was quickly disabused of that notion by Shook. “It’s an actor’s play,” she says. “By which I mean that you can tell right away that this is a play written by an actor.”

The Tennessee-born, Texas-raised Schenkkan is and the author of several other works, but it’s unlikely that he would have ever forged “The Kentucky Cycle” had he not been an actor at 1984’s Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville.

There, Schenkkan was playing in Len Jenkin’s “Swap,” set in contemporary eastern Kentucky. A pediatrician, Dr. Greg Culley, was in the audience, and struck up a conversation with Schenkkan after the show.

“He had had a practice in the Cumberlands in the early ‘70s,” Schenkkan recalls, “and wanted to see what it was like after several years. I really wanted to see firsthand the setting of ‘Swap,’ so he invited me to take a trip there.”

Schenkkan had no notion of the shocking scene he was about to witness, despite Culley’s descriptions of how his small medical team had penetrated the steep, remote, poverty-stricken Kentucky hills and helped reduce the region’s staggering infant mortality rate of 19 deaths per 1,000.

Arriving in the town of Hazard (“the place names tell you everything,” says the playwright), Culley and Schenkkan spent a day scouring the area, visiting some of Culley’s past patients.

Sadness mixed with horror seeps into Schenkkan’s voice, as if he had just witnessed the desolation: “We found a miner and his wife living in a typical mountain house, a shotgun shack. Their two kids had died from sewage-tainted water. A coal stove was the only source for heat, light and cooking. The place was built on a combination sewage-gravel pit.

“Mind you, these folks were living relatively well. But what really blew my mind was visiting a mine owner that night. He lived in a mansion with an indoor swimming pool, two sports cars and all the drugs and booze you could want. When I mentioned what we had seen that day, the owner seemed to resent that I was concerned about these people. He thought it was their own damn fault that they were so poor.”

Traveling between the Cumberlands’ wealthy and destitute, Schenkkan found that “the landscape reflected the people. The hills first appear old and rounded, lush, green, extremely beautiful. Then you take a bend in the road and, suddenly, the hills are strip-mined, so exposed that it looks like the moon. It’s not so much soil as layers of sulfuric acid, which leach into the ground water and poison the local water supply. I had never seen such devastation in America.”

He had also never seen such potential material for a play. On Culley’s recommendation, Schenkkan read Harry M. Caudill’s seminal history of the region, “Night Comes to the Cumberlands.” The book inspired a one-act, “Tall Tales,” (now Play 6 in the “Cycle”).

Moving to Los Angeles in the mid-’80s, Schenkkan, a member of New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, took his piece to the company’s L.A. branch. Tuck Milligan, still with the “Cycle” five years after a first reading of “Tall Tales,” says that “it’s pretty funny to remember, now that this thing has grown so huge, that Robert felt that ‘Tall Tales’ was too short for one evening. So he wrote an accompanying piece, ‘A Dark and Bloody Land.’ ”

Now titled “Masters of the Trade,” it begins the “Cycle” with the entrance of Michael Rowen (Charles Hallahan), an escapee from indentured servitude who uses every means at his disposal to get some wild Kentucky land and a Cherokee wife. The play’s first half traces, from 1775 to the Civil War, the generational battle of revenge between the poor Rowens and the wealthier Talberts. The second half moves toward the 20th Century, when a barely civilized people had their worlds turned upside down by exploitative corporations and miraculously fought back with the miners union, which ultimately failed the interests of the workers it meant to represent.

Through it all is the sense, as Schenkkan says, “of the sins of the father visiting the son.” What struck Taper dramaturge Tom Bryant “was this sense of things being handed down, the horrible inevitability of that.”

Indeed, cycle here is both form and content for the playwright: “The work is full of cycles--time, space, dramatic styles, violence, social, and they wrap into each other. We begin with men around a campfire at daybreak, and that’s where we are in the last play. I spent a lot of time structuring each play, and both halves, so that they would resonate and recall previous scenes.”

In Seattle last summer, the hard work centered on Plays 5 (Civil War) and 7 (the union’s rise). According to Davidson, when he saw in Seattle how far Play 7 had advanced from the Taper workshops, he felt the “Cycle” was at last ready for the Taper main stage.

“I’ll tell you what’s kept me going, besides the fact that I’m a stubborn son of a bitch,” says Schenkkan, “is knowing that Gordon called my agent from the Seattle-to-L.A. plane to grab the ‘Cycle’ before any other theater got to it first, even though it was going to turn the Taper’s season upside down. Or that Tuck Milligan flew himself out to do a reading of the play at the Long Wharf. That kind of dedication showed me that I wasn’t completely nuts to spend half a decade getting this thing right.”