But Richenthal wouldn’t stop pedaling. He decided to allow theater-goers to buy tickets for each part separately at $50. Still, the cycle’s natural audience would seem to be in the regional, nonprofit theaters. The 40-year-old Schenkkan, an actor writing his first major work, took on an ambitious task that would have challenged dramatists from Aeschylus to O’Neill. What he’s come up with is much closer to a TV miniseries than to the Oresteia.
The cycle consists of nine miniplays that range in time from 1775 to 1975 in the Cumberland region of eastern Kentucky. The literally seminal figure is Michael Rowen, an indentured servant from Ireland who’ll do anything to acquire land: he brutally kills a young farmer, gives blankets laden with smallpox to the local Cherokees, takes an Indian as his wife, slitting her heel tendons so she can’t run away. “What kind of animal are you?” asks a Cherokee. “A necessary animal,” replies Rowen. It’s one of the best lines in a play that too often speaks like posters rather than poetry.
Rowen breeds sons (he kills his unwanted infant daughter) who interrelate over many generations with two other families, one of them black slaves. The saga weaves a tapestry whose threads are black and red with evil and blood: Indians are cheated, speculators seize land, the Civil War explodes, coal barons pillage the country, unions fight them and then fall in cahoots with them. It’s an oft-told tale that Schenkkan oddly thinks he’s the first to tell. In an interview he said: “If I don’t do that, who will? If writers don’t begin that process, then who will?”
Schenkkan’s hubris is less important than his passion for his subject, and such passion is rare in the theater. But art is as brutal a taskmaster as Michael Bowen, and passion must be informed by gifts for language and character that are spottily displayed in this immense work. Schenkkan writes with a bludgeon, and too often his characters are like figures in a historical museum who have been fitted with taped dialogue. A dedicated cast of 21 is led by Stacy Keach who, as Michael and subsequent Rowens, is a prodigy of strength. Warner Shook’s staging, undeniably energetic, is subverted by a relentlessly declamatory, often hectoring style that’s a simulacrum of true theatrical power.
