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The Kentucky Cycle , a series of nine one-act plays, is the story of three Kentucky families—the white Rowens and Talberts, and the African Biggses—that are linked by kinship and a "dark and bloody" history. This complicated, ambitious work is woven through 200 years of family and neighbor relations polluted by six generations of what playwright Robert Schenkkan has called "spiritual poverty". The place, a piece of eastern Kentucky mountain land rich in coal, is just as much a character in the script as the tragic players.

The play starts as Michael Rowen, an Irish immigrant, murderously acquires Indian land. He marries a squaw, lames her physically and mentally, and produces a son and daughter. Upon birth, the daughter is left to the elements, and the son grows up to kill his father and betray his mother. Thus the stage is set for a cycle of sin, revenge and redemption that models the Greek tragedy of Agamemnon. The play ends after feuding its way through the mine labor-management wars of the 1930s, the fall of UMWA president Tony Boyle, the development of the war on poverty and the strip-mine boom of 1975. Both legend and specific historical events are transformed into a general, universal dramatization of the defeat of the human spirit.

The Pulitzer and the American Dream
Critics and reviewers have defined this play in the language of theater and the American culture. It has an "Old Testament dimension" and the "classic fabric of the Greeks and grand opera"; it has been labeled a "sprawling tale" of "epic scope", a "brilliant conflation of allegory and realism" with "historical sweep"; it uncovers "the bitter bedrock of the American myth." Few, if any, have looked at it as a statement about Appalachia; instead they have chosen or have been steered toward looking at it as a metaphor for America.

Indeed, Schenkkan's 1992 Pulitzer Prize for drama is one of 21 prizes given annually to those works that " affirm" the American dream of "a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank." The award in drama used to be given to the play that "best represents the educational value and power of stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners. ..." However, when Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf failed to win in 1963, there was a critical outrage. As a result, the criterion for the drama award was reworded and the "raising the standard" clause deleted. Somewhat ironically, according to Pulitzer scholar Blair Anderson, recent winning plays have depicted the American family and social life as promising anything but "a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank". Similarly, The Kentucky Cycle exposes the darkest side of American life, but it also offers a modest affirmation that redemption—or at least a change of consciousness—can ultimately be achieved.

The Kentucky Cycle is being presented as an all-American story—not as a tale of Appalachia. Just before the play opened at the Mark Taper Forum Theater in Los Angeles, The Kentucky Cycle director Warner Shook told the L. A. Times, "This could just as easily be called 'The California Cycle'. It's not about hillbillies. It's a reflection of the state of the union." Nonetheless, when playwright Schenkkan speaks about his generative impulse, he talks about the "spiritual poverty" in the Appalachia that haunted his creation of The Kentucky Cycle. Although the play embodies the universality that makes its a workable piece of theater, no one can dismiss the setting as purely accidental. The script borrows many stories and a great deal of historic and mythic detail from earlier works about the region.

"Recollections" of the Civil War
God's Great Supper, play number 5, is Schenkkan's account of the Civil War and its aftermath. It shows how personal the war became and indicates how it played out in the ensuing mountain feuds. (At present we are witnessing some of the same type of blood feuds erupting in eastern Europe 50 years after, but the direct result of, World War II.) Schenkkan effectively uses mountain civil war lore almost to a fault. He lifts an historical account out of Wilkeson's Recollections of a Private Soldier with skillfull dramatic detail. Theater–goers can now witness the power of this story of murder and revenge that is passed on from widowed mother to sons and daughters. Schenkkan's retelling of Harry Caudill's compelling account of the same incident in Night Comes to the Cumberlands will help a wider audience understand what some Appalachian scholars have been suggesting for years— that in the mountains the Civil War was about much more than slavery.
Unfortunately, Kentucky's esteemed author and historian, the late Harry Caudill, never won a Pultzer Prize. Neither, thank God, did local colorist John Fox, Jr. This Paris, Kentucky-born writer collected true local stories, fictionalized colorful accounts of real-life characters, and retold the stories as his own in several romantic novels. Fox was the author of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a turn-of-the-century novel set in the Appalachian mountains. It tells the story of an educated outsider who comes to the region as a surveyor for a coal company and falls in love with a mountain girl. He proceeds to send her off to the Bluegrass to become educated and "culturated" so that she can become a lady worth his affections and hand. He then fights with the antagonists, local toughs who are against the infant coal industry. One of the alleged anti-progressives, Cousin Dave Tolliver, warns, "There's machinery in your mountains, there's 'furriners' diggin' your coal."

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine became one of the first million-seller novels in this country and was adapted into three motion pictures. Having gone to the mountains and appropriated the myths and symbols, Fox used these images and became relatively famous and moderately wealthy. However, the region still suffers from the stereotypes and myths that he helped enhance and some that he created in his representations.

Cultural Stripmining in the Appalachian Information Age?
I have not seen a live performance of The Kentucky Cycle, but in reading the script I find similarities between the work of Schenkkan and that of Fox—similarities that may be derivative or purely coincidental.

Tall Tales, now play number six of the nine-play series, finds a land prospector, J.T.Wells, in the woods watching a young mountain woman, Mary Anne Rowen. She is looking down at her reflection in a clear mountain stream. J.T. surprises her and warns her of the dangers of this act, giving her a mountainized version of the legend of Narcissus. They engage in a flirtatious conversation and just as they start the preliminaries to physical love–making, along comes her gun–toting sweetheart, Tommy. This local boy later proves to be as dumb as he is mad. In the opening pages of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine , beside another mountain stream, a Victorian love scene between Jack and June, is interupted by a gun-toting hillbilly, in this case, her father.

(I will continue at the risk of sounding like Senator Orrin Hatch at the Thomas' confirmation hearings when he announced that his aides had discovered an alleged connection between Ms. Hill's testimony about pubic hair and a passage from The Exorcist.) Schenkkan's and Fox's stories have similar characters and subplots, but Fox's message is colonial, while Schenkkan's is anti-colonial. The lead males, J.T. and Jack, are educated outsiders advancing progress for the coal industry. The lead females, Mary Anne and June, are young mountain lasses attracted to these outsiders and the outside world. Both women's fathers, Judd Tolliver and Jed Rowen, respectively, own land with mineral under it and are strong, outspoken patriarchs. Each woman is pursued by a jealous, hillbilly suitor who is portrayed as reckless, dumb and unlikable. Each family feels that the native suitor is not good enough for their daughter. The Rowens and the Tollivers each welcome the outsider into their homes for a drink of "shine" and each family is won over. Each jealous hillbilly suitor attempts to murder the outsider and fails. Both plots contain symbolic trees placed at the beginning and end of the tales— a lone Oak that "holds up the sky", a lone Pine that "stands guard on high against the outer world".

Schenkkan has also made use of the rich heritage of mountain storytelling traditions. J.T., the land speculator who buys up mineral rights, tells stories as a means of ingratiating himself with "the natives". During the course of his evening with the Rowens, he spins three yarns. In one tale, J.T. puts a colonial twist on a Shakespearean classic: Romeo, an outsider come to the mountains, and Juliet, a mountain lass, fall in love. But instead of dying in the end, Juliet comes back to life; the couple kills her hillbilly fiance and escapes to New York.
In another tale, J.T. tells a common tall tale straight from Kentucky folklore based on the "horn of plenty" motif. A similar tall tale and variants can be found from Leonard Roberts' collection,I Bought Me a Dog. J.T. also tells a story much like Wicked John and the Devil with God instead of Saint Peter walking the earth (Kentucky) to see if he can find any decent folks. He finds them and grants them the proverbial wish which, of course, comes true along with his dark prediction of the fate of the mountains.

Tall Tales (as in several of the other plays) also contains instances where Schnekkan is to be faulted for sloppy research on some minute historical details. For example, during the course of his evening visit, J.T. announces that President Garfield was assassinated four years earlier, unbeknownst to the isolated hillbillies, and there have been two presidents since. They still do not know who is president until he informs them. News travels slow in the mountains, especially political news from Washington.

Although Schenkkan's mountain people seem slow to grasp current events, they are quite precocious in acquiring slang terms, as this excerpt from Tall Tales indicates:

Mary Anne: ( in reference to Tommy )
... Mr. Wells, (J.T.) would you be good enough to tell this poor, ignorant, hillbilly what you'd be doin in these parts?

In the next scene, while drinking moonshine and denying young Tommy the access to his gun we hear her father;

Jed: ( to Tommy )
Boy, you are one ignorant, dumb hillbilly.

The term "hillbilly" has been used pejoratively and humorously in American print since April 23, 1900, when it first appeared in Hearst's New York Journal . The newspaper referred to a "Hill–billie" as "a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama ... who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of ... drinks whiskey when he can get it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." I guess name calling trends travel slower than political news because in Schenkkan's Kentucky, people are calling each other "hillbilly" back in 1885, a full 15 years before a journalist got ahold of the term way down in Alabama.

Though Tall Tales is a bit cartoonish, it does weave an interesting story, especially after Mary Anne fails to seduce J.T. He then reveals to her his deviousness and collusion with the mineral prospecting business. Though heavy–handed, Mary Anne's prologue and epilogue effectively foreshadow the rape of the mountains:

"Spring explodes in these mountains like a two pound charge of double fine black powder hand–tamped down a rathole. . . . .Fella once told me a story, said all this was covered in ocean once, long time ago. And now I think sometimes, maybe Spring is just the Mountains dreamin' of those days when sharks made nests up on their peaks..."

According to Russian theater pioneer Stanislavsky, the purpose of theater is "to bring to light the life of the human soul". And the theater has been a place historically where "we can go to hear the truth". In my reading of this play, it has done both with varying degrees of success. The play falls short in the second half when the dialogue gets bogged down in very cognitive information, however historically accurate. Since the play mostly deals with murder, it would have been exciting to read, for instance, an awareness and dramatic treatment of the murder of Jock Yablonski and all that it stood for. The ninth play, The War on Poverty War , seeks to inform and reform by telling us instead of showing us; we learn about social conditions, but the characters take a back seat. If the purpose of theater is in "communicating and inspiring ethical behavior", as Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright David Mamet suggests, then the author needs another draft — the ending is not clear. But among the play's merits is that it is written not as a place to forget, but a place to remember, and as such it is good theater.
The Kentucky Cycle is a very important piece of writing that has focused the public eye once again on Kentucky. Other works such as Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Harlan County USA, and Coalminer's Daughter have stood the test of time and are masterpieces. In closing, I am reminded of a line from Night Comes to the Cumberlands that could serve as an admonition to those writing about Appalachian history and culture:

"My narrative is not founded on hasty first impressions," wrote Harry Caudill in 1963. In many ways the verdict is still out on The Kentucky Cycle. Feminist writers, African-American writers, Appalachian scholars, and theater critics will now begin the process of evaluating this work. It is ambitious, provocative work and deserving of their scrutiny and praise.

© Jack Wright, Athens, Ohio June 15, 1992