Play Transfers Chekhov Tale to Appalachia to Study Greed’s Impact

“The first sounds I heard were hill sounds,” playwright Romulus Linney has said. They are sounds that echo lyrically through his most-produced plays, those about the inhabitants of Appalachia.

They’re much in evidence in “Unchanging Love,” an Appalachian drama loosely based on Chekhov’s short story “In the Ravine,” but informed by Linney’s background and deep attachments to the people he grew up with. The West Coast premiere of the play is Friday at Hollywood’s Fountain Theatre, under the direction of the Fountain’s artistic director, Stephen Sachs.

Linney says two-thirds of his output is not about Appalachia. One-third is composed of what he refers to as “history plays,” such as his dramas about Frederick the Great, Lord Byron and Hermann Goering; another third, as Linney states, has to do “with my life in the Army, and personal plays about artists and people I know, more modern sort of things.”

However, it is the third that looks deeply into life in the mountains of Appalachia that has gained him his greatest fame. “Unchanging Love,” which translated easily from Chekhov to the Carolinas, according to the playwright, tells of a family consumed with greed, and how love of money can destroy the soul. Linney is, above all, honest about his subjects.

“I can’t write a play,” he says, “unless something very, very personal is at stake. Something happens on a personal level that’s connected to a memory. I can’t write them otherwise. I’m not really interested in the sociological aspects of Appalachia, and God knows I’m not interested in trying to capitalize on the hillbilly aspect, or anything like that. I really get upset when productions of my Appalachian plays are done that way. Whether the play is about a European king like Frederick, or about snake-handling folks in ‘Holy Ghosts,’ I can’t write it unless I’m very deeply engaged or involved in my memories of my life, which correspond in some way to what’s going on.”

Born in Philadelphia, Linney was taken back to his parents’ home in North Carolina when he was 3, and that’s where the writer was shaped. Folk songs run through the action of “Unchanging Love” (as they do in many of Chekhov’s plays). They were a big part of Linney’s youth, he says, the “folk songs I sang in high school, with a guitar, beer and a girl on a beach. Then, one day I read ‘In the Ravine,’ and I remembered a folk-singing family of the ‘50s, the man and his wife, and his beautiful daughter.”

A singing family such as this became part of the world of “Unchanging Love.” The beautiful daughter, in the play a girl who is slow, and considered “dimwitted,” in Linney’s words, marries one of the grasping sons of a hill-town merchant, who is reveling in his own second marriage to a woman 30 years younger. The other son has married Lena, the economic dynamo of the family.

Robin Riker, who plays Lena in this production, says her character is a “mountain Medea.” Lena’s attitude, she says, is that “we can make money off of this. The family works with the larceny in another person’s soul,” Riker says.

Riker, born to a theatrical family, first appeared on stage at the age of 2. She studied at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and became very involved in theater, she says, “and all those things.” Lately she’s been doing a lot of television, including four seasons on “Brothers” and working as a series regular on “Get a Life,” which had just wrapped its current season when Riker found out that she had captured the role of Lena.

“I was jumping up and down in trumps,” she says with a laugh. “I’ve done a great deal of television and film, but working on television is like sitting down to a nine-course meal and only being able to have the hors d’oeuvres. It’s certainly nothing like doing the ‘work’ of theater.”

The subject matter of the play is part of what attracted her to the plum role of Lena. “Doing the right thing has been the Gordian knot of mankind, it seems. It’s the love of money. It’s borne out in every single scenario from Christ to Milken. It was ever thus.”

The play’s family patriarch, Ben Pitman, is played by James E. Brodhead, whose career began in New York. He was in the original cast of “Inherit the Wind” with Paul Muni and Ed Begley. He worked steadily during TV’s golden age with the likes of John Gielgud, Jessica Tandy and Luther Adler. In Hollywood, he became a member of Lucille Ball’s television “stock company” and often worked on shows such as “General Hospital” and for three seasons on “The Judge.” He was thinking about retirement when he read “Unchanging Love.”

He chuckles about it now. Recalling his indecision, he says: “My wife asked me, ‘Are you an actor or not?’ I read the script and said, ‘OK. I’m an actor.’ ”

About the play, he says: “It’s soaring and lyrical. But all that shimmers in the air for these people is the almighty dollar. It’s a marvelous parable of the ‘80s.” Though the play takes place in the early 1920s, Brodhead finds it pertinent today. “There are the haves and the have-nots. We should think about how we should use our power.”

Its relevance is what persuaded director Sachs to do the play. “Its two themes,” he comments, “are greed and faith, and they run like rivers through the play. It’s something that has been a personal struggle for this country, especially today. The ultimate point is that the soul is truly important. When we choose to follow the dollar instead of our hearts, that’s when we get into trouble.”

Linney has always found that moral lessons grow like weeds in the soil of Appalachia. And he doesn’t believe that a writer can gloss over the flaws in its inhabitants to make something mythic out of the current of evil that runs through their struggles.

“You have to be honest about them,” he says. “The mountains are not easy to live in. The people came from the jails of Europe,” he says, referring to the European policy of transporting criminals to their colonies, “and it was a harsh life. It was very brutal, especially on women. The men, in their clashes and fights, were not very gallant about anything.”

He also found that “they appreciated certain things about life that were really quite marvelous.” Things such as the folk songs Linney grew up with; the deep, if sometimes misdirected, faith of the hill people, and their narrow comprehension of love. “The world is changing around them,” Linney says, but he hopes they never change.