COMMENTARY : Charting the Decline of the Dream

There is an acrid, show-stopping number in the musical “Miss Saigon” in which a Eurasian pimp, whose only goal in life is making it into the United States, offers a vulgar, greed-ridden vision of the American dream. It translates as a gaudy palace of fat purses and cheap thrills that would have come as a shock to the early settlers of the nation.

But then the dream, once considered something of a constitutional prerogative, has fallen on bad times. If we didn’t know it by the end of the high-flying ‘80s, when everyone was too busy making money to pay attention, we know it now.

Did this dewy offshoot of the nation’s puritanical ethic ever exist? Or was it a phantom devised to put a smiling face on a sterner reality, so that we might bully our way west with proprietary arrogance, claiming the land and its possibilities from those who had it first? Whatever the answers, dream propaganda isn’t selling.

It lost its luster when the nation lost its innocence, a phenomenon that the theater has been pointing to for years.

This new hankering for honesty, this pervasive quest to retrieve our moral underpinnings and an even harsher impulse to demystify the dream seem to be manifest in the infant ‘90s. Nowhere more so than in Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” at the Mark Taper Forum.

This six-hour, two-part opus magnum that closes Sunday is a fictional history of the ravaging of Kentucky’s Cumberland Plateau in a series of nine playlets. It addresses those larger issues of myth and reality, truth and deceit and is, in a broader sense, a vast metaphor for an ailing nation.

By retelling often gripping tales of settlers ruthlessly angling for advantage, holding the land hostage and placing cupidity above the laws of God or kin, Schenkkan illuminates the cankers of violence and rapacity that have been boring their way through the collective American conscience for the last 200 years.

Americans don’t own exclusive rights to such bad behavior, but it is singularly American to insist on masking such moral churlishness with patriotic overtones. “The Kentucky Cycle” may not be the first play to strip the cant from history, but it is the first one to do it on such an epic scale.

Not that corroborating evidence hasn’t been piling up. The sense that the nation’s in trouble is hardly new. It began to infect American theater shortly after World War II but came into full flower in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Sam Shepard’s dysfunctional-family plays (“The Curse of the Starving Class,” “Buried Child,” “A Lie of the Mind”) were the trailblazers, gradually joined by David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” and “Speed-the-Plow,” a rancorous echo of which can be found in Arthur Kopit’s “Road to Nirvana” (closing a four-month run at the Odyssey Theatre on Sunday).

Jonathan Marc Sherman’s “Veins and Thumbtacks,” seen last year at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, dashed a young man’s hopes in front of a cruelly distorting social mirror. Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy” (South Coast Repertory, 1990; New York’s Circle-in-the-Square, 1992) mordantly dissects America’s fatal attraction to that toxic combination of the American dream and its notorious counterpart: the hunger for Hollywood Celebrity. And much of Keith Reddin’s off-kilter work, but especially his “Life During Wartime” (La Jolla Playhouse, 1990), depicts the havoc wreaked by the derailment of sanity on the Family of Man.

What’s chilling is how close to parody our reality has come. Kevin Armold and Gus Buktenica’s “Rage, or I’ll Be Home for Christmas” (an offbeat holiday show at the Alliance Repertory Theater in Burbank that was held over into March) is a fearless double whammy that found uncanny parallels in real life. It gruesomely re-created the spiritual vacuum that lets violence rip into the center of society; then, in a second, almost separate act, invented a neo-absurdist TV game show on Death Row that railed against that medium’s trivializing of the real horror. In a classic case of life imitating art, NBC recently aired the first of its “I Witness Video,” based on home tapings of real-life disasters--murders included.

While none of these plays compare much to each other or to Schenkkan’s “Cycle,” they spring from the same well. Call it the impulse to correct reality by offering an unvarnished and unflattering vision of the past. It can be distorting or revisionist, but in all cases it is designed to show up the distance between historical truth and social appeasement.

With its spare, short scenes, deft structure and keen sense of poetry, “Kentucky Cycle” stops well short of moralizing, but its subliminal message is clear: that the orgy of self-destruction and self-gratification (one and the same) may have done to the nation the kind of damage unfettered greed did to the “dark and bloody land” of the Cumberland Plateau.

The five plays of Part I and the first two of Part II burst with talent and adventure. They present lyrical, detailed, sometimes breathtaking stories about several generations of three interconnected families in which everyone, sooner or later, is a villain. What Schenkkan has wrought is an American “Nicholas Nickleby,” with all of the color, variety, vivacity, minutiae--and length--of that Royal Shakespeare Company confection, right down to a comic take on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (a tall tale with a happy ending here about the “Montages” and the “Caplets”).

But where “Nickleby” was a literary souffle, “Cycle” intentionally casts a longer shadow. Its flavor is strictly frontier American--eloquent and ominous, with far-reaching analogies to the Greeks and such Eastern masterworks as “The Mahabharata,” the Great Story of Mankind.

Had Schenkkan been able to sustain that tack to the end, “Cycle” might qualify as a piece of major American writing. It comes very close. But when he settles for mouths being fired instead of guns, characters turn into pawns engaged in a shouting match. Since they’re not designed to be larger than life, we can’t attribute to them the satirical lunges of a Kopit or of Armold and Buktenica.

Like Shepard, Reddin and the others, however, Schenkkan is tracking our national conscience. He creates a brilliant parable, embracing our past even as he mistrusts it. The paradox illuminates fact, reminding us of where we came from, who we are and where, if we’re not careful, we might be headed. Even flawed, the mass and substance of his play, which suits the country’s refractory mood and yearning for reassessment, gives it a preeminence and power that the shorter works only zap us with.

It is also well titled.

Civilizations, like anything else, have finite cycles. Simplistic parallels are regularly drawn by doomsayers between America in the 1990s and the fall of Rome. But a nation that will scrutinize itself, even a nation “born of thieves and murderers,” isn’t ready to be written off. It grows stronger with each hard look, each ironic scrap of self-examination.

Giddy rumors to the contrary, artists cannot change the world. And even though one of them is now president of Czechoslovakia, neither can playwrights. But they can help us locate our place in it, something we, as thrust-together Americans, have enormous trouble doing. By acknowledging the past as it was, instead of draping it in American flags, we might empower ourselves to redirect the future. That reality could beat any dream, American or other.