STAGE REVIEW : Skillful Execution Enhances ‘Cycle’

No sooner have the lights come up on the grayness of the Mark Taper Forum stage than we are told, in a brief prologue to the first of the nine episodic plays that comprise Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle,” that what we are about to see and hear are “lessons in perfidy” designed for “nervous times” in “a dark and bloody land.”

Those are pertinent, if ominous, words that prove to be only the tip of the slag heap.

Schenkkan’s “Cycle” is miniseries theater--an epic 200-year history of Kentucky’s Cumberland Plateau that opened last weekend and whose two parts, each lasting a chock-full three hours, become a gripping, garrulous metaphor for the violent history of our nation and, in a larger sense, the history of mankind.

Perfidy and blood are its hallmarks, the rape and desecration of the land its outward manifestations, the cultural sterility a ruthless legacy of greed and accommodation. No one, least of all the land, emerges untarnished.

Given the scope of its ambition and sheer mass of the undertaking, this “Cycle” could have gone under in a miasma of didacticism or moral attitudinizing. In Part II, or the second 100 years, where the grasping hands of the mining industry close in like a vise on those beautiful Kentucky mountains, and management and labor start trading verbal assaults instead of the shotgun blasts that filled Part I, things tend to get wordy and cerebral.

But Schenkkan has spent the first three hours--or the first 100 years--carefully laying out the genealogical map and getting us hooked on festering generational gripes and internecine warfare. We’re swept from Indian Wars, through nasty family feuds, to the land grabs and coal-mining enterprises that erupt in labor-management disputes, union unrest and the despoiling of the land.

The playwright’s achievement lies in the manner in which he delivers these goods. Schenkkan is a painter who fills the corners of his very broad canvas with the skill of a miniaturist. By tracing the history of three warring and intermarrying families--the Rowens, the Talberts and the Biggses--in emotionally detailed brush strokes, he puts together a panoramic history of the region. His microcosm of human events illuminates a macrocosm of historical fact.

Under Warner Shook’s intentionally plain direction this is all done with mirrors: the implosive immediacy of live performance that separates the stage from its less potent electronic counterparts. Not that this “Cycle” is technically all that simple. It merely gives the appearance of simplicity.

There is no multimedia, no sliding sets or flashing images; only some occasional sleight of hand and the glue of a superbly versatile and well-calibrated ensemble of 20 actors, all playing more than one role.

They function in an equally balanced context: Peter Maradudin’s filtered and/or symbolic lighting, the muted earth tones of Frances Kenny’s costumes, Jim Ragland’s original compositions (some performed by him on stage), and the building blocks of an elemental set designed like rough-hewn Lincoln Logs by Michael Olich. Within it, the Kentucky land is seen symbolically as a rectangle relentlessly shrinking, slowly covered over block by block.

A lot of work has gone into creating this cohesion, including readings, workshops and a full production last summer at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, which is the co-producer here. But beyond the enhancing economy of the physical production lies a spare, well-written script, in which the tightly woven fabric of personal treachery, love and deceit is as inevitable as Greek tragedy.

There are no pretensions to the moral imperatives of Greek tragedy, but there are analogies. When in the third play, “The Homecoming,” a disgruntled Patrick Rowen (Scott MacDonald) murders his ruthless father, Michael (Charles Hallahan), with the tacit acceptance of his mother (Lillian Garrett-Groag), we are reminded of the rancor that brought down the House of Atreus.

In the fourth play, “Ties That Bind,” we can see aspects of the clan feuds of Peter Brook’s “The Mahabharata.” Patrick is humiliated by Jeremiah Talbert (Gregory Itzin) who, in a relentless act of vengeance, takes away everything Patrick possesses, including every shred of his dignity.

These similarities of moral destiny seem to be purely coincidental, but they underline the tremendous force and momentum found in Part I of the “Cycle.” It is never quite matched in Part II, which suffers from the differing nature of the events that populate it--namely, the stridently vocal struggles of labor and management, and of labor and labor trying to unionize.

And yet, even here Schenkkan does not lose sight of the importance of keeping family relationships in primary focus, within the context of political events. The final moments of the “Cycle,” with the discovery of the remains of a child lost in the opening play, is as full of reverberations as anything that has gone before.

It completes the sense of interacting cycles spelled out in the title. The message that we are a violent nation unable to break the thrust of denial and destruction is meant to encourage reflection on a history of misguided priorities and a mythology that still casts genocidal acts in a patriotic glow.

But Schenkkan is no moralist. He’s a poet who wants to make us think, and does. Rarely has such a fundamentally serious tale been so well told, in such a blunt yet rip-roaring fashion, and with such a generous quotient of humor to light the darkness.

“The Kentucky Cycle,” parts I and II. Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Music Center. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends March 29. $75; (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000, TDD (213) 680-4017). Schedule hot line (213) 972-0717. Running time Part I: 3 hours; Part II: 3 hours.