THEATER REVIEW : ‘Kentucky Cycle’ Makes Impression on Broadway

It takes nerve to come to Broadway with a two-part, six-hour epic about 200 years in the history of a piece of land. And the land’s not even Manhattan, and your only brand-name actor is Stacy Keach, who couldn’t keep his own show open a month on Broadway last year, and your scenery has no smoking movable parts.

It takes guts to charge $100 a seat for a non-musical about the common man that wasn’t first produced at a London theater with royal in the name. And the playwright isn’t Charles Dickens or even Tony Kushner and, though you’ve got a Pulitzer Prize, so does “Angels in America,” your competition for the limited audience with unlimited attention spans, and “Angels” has all the cache.

But courage, we all know, is not enough to justify such investments of life and money in a mere theater experience, even in flush decades. So it’s a pleasure to report that, for enough time to matter, “The Kentucky Cycle” gives as good as its takes. It starts slowly, it has dry patches, it’s at its most obvious when trying to be the most poetic, it can be hokey, derivative, melodramatic.

Mostly, however, this is enormously engrossing stuff, the sort of plain, strong, important storytelling that sucks our attention right into its world, and, like a big historical novel on a rainy day, won’t let go until the place becomes our own.

Robert Schenkkan’s saga, which fought its way in from the nonprofits with virtually no concessions to Broadway glitz, remains a true oddball marathon of mythic adventure.

Told ruthlessly and eloquently in the most simple story-theater style, it uses nine short plays to cover 200 years of land-grabbing in the Cumberland hills--a sort of Appalachian “Nicholas Nickleby” in which the land is the silent protagonist and the outcome’s always tragic.

Schenkkan’s “Cycle” was developed in regional theaters around America, culminating in Warner Shook’s successful productions at Seattle’s Intiman and Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. Since the Pulitzer, some Kentuckians have challenged Schenkkan’s authenticity and revisionist history.

He has answered, persuasively, that this is a work of fiction, not a documentary, and less a story of corruption in a specific area than the nightmare flip side of the whole American frontier mythology. Although one can understand the concerns of those who see their home turned into a theatrical device for Broadway, it’s hard to imagine how Schenkkan could have dramatized his passionately sympathetic saga from the Indians to the strip-miners without putting it somewhere real.

He would have had to find a setting broad and rich enough to encompass ancestral blood feuds from slavery to Bosnia, from the Hatfields and McCoys to the Montagues and Capulets--with more than casual ties to Steinbeck and the Greeks.

The child is the father of the man, you see, in this evolving genealogy of three families. The sins of the fathers heavy on the backs of the sons. Although womenfolk get dragged down, most of this is male business, and they’re making deals without honor and things always turn out bad.

The big fish eat the little fish, until the buccaneering coal sharks eat whomever and wherever they please. Along the way, not incidentally, is a two-century history of the development of the gun.

At the center, however, are the personal stories, one after another on the same land, appealing to much the same curiosity we feel in a hotel room when we wish the walls could talk. This is one of the most modest Big Events imaginable, the use of enormous forces without pretense, with a raked wooden slab of a stage, rusty scaffolds, a few movable props and people sitting in witness on the sides. A background disk comes down in the less mythic second half to become a mine. When the mine blows up, a bank of red lights means fire.

Except for Keach, replacing an actor who got a movie deal, the production remains almost identical to the one at the Taper.

There are additional actors to switch around in some of the less significant of Schenkkan’s 72 characters, and one misses a bit of the immediacy of the original thrust stage in the adaptation to proscenium.

But Keach fits right into the fine ensemble, which gracefully turns itself, over and over, into the families of families. It all begins in 1775, when a ruthless Irishman named Michael Rowen (Keach) cheats some Cherokees out of 39 acres of land and, while he’s at it, gives them blankets contaminated by the pox. “A new day for a new land,” he explains at the end of the first play, called “Masters of the Trade.”

Schenkkan likes heroic, ironic titles, which actors announce before each section, along with the year and a rather blithe description of the scene, usually brutal, to come. When Michael steals himself an Indian wife (Lillian Garrett-Groag) and slices her tendon so she can’t run, the title is “The Courtship of Morning Star.”

We go from one grudge match to another, with the Rowens in a blood feud with their neighbors, and an unspoken blood tie with a black family, whom we first meet through a slave (Gail Grate) and her son (Ronald William Lawrence). Tuck Milligan is especially chameleonic as a variety of angry sons. So is Gregory Itzin as various conflicted businessmen who cheat the locals of their mineral rights.

The second half, about the development and corruption of the labor movement and the devastation of strip mining is, perhaps inevitably, less mysterious and more predictable.

In general, this play is as unfashionable as the labor movement, not quite as flawed and just as worthy. When a Rowen stands in the rubble of this lush land and hollers to an endangered wolf, “run, you son-of-a-bitch, run,” the impulse is to yell something similar to the play.

* “The Kentucky Cycle.” Epic by Robert Schenkkan, directed by Warner Shook. Royale Theater, 45th Street west of Broadway. Seen at Wednesday’s press previews.