Despite Contrivances, `Kentucky Cycle' Is A Powerful Stage Epic

"The Kentucky Cycle" by Robert Schenkkan. Produced by Intiman Theatre. Tuesdays-Sundays through July 13. 626-0782.

The Kentucky in Robert Schenkkan's sprawling new play, "The Kentucky Cycle," has a violent and remorseless past - and an uncertain future. It is a once-beauteous region stripped of its riches, natural splendor, and sense of community by 200 years of human greed.

Weighing in at nine acts and six and a half hours, this opus chronicles the progress (and ultimate self-destruction) of an Appalachian clan over seven generations. Like the film "Dances With Wolves," it offers a revisionist view of the pioneer saga, indicting the frontier ethos as a source of ecological, social and spiritual ruin.

Thanks to Schenkkan's narrative skill, and to the exemplary production Intiman Theatre has mustered, the tale mostly justifies its length.

Like some James Michener novels and other fictionalizations of American history, "The Kentucky Cycle" is basically a ripping good yarn with the soul of a moral polemic. It falters only when straining too hard for the epic catharsis of classical tragedy, or bogging down in contrivances.

Performed by 13 excellent actors, the work has been staged by Warner Shook in an accessible style of minimalist story-theater. With only slight changes of Frances Kenny's costumes, the cast handles 72 roles, convincing you they are the granddaughters and great-grandsons of characters they portrayed moments before.

They also keep the action smooth by shifting the rustic scenery on Michael Olich's stark, effective set. (The painterly lighting, which reflects the changing Kentucky landscape, is another fine job by Peter Maradudin.)

The play's opening segment, "Masters of the Trade," instills a taut, pitiless tone and an abiding theme of land lust. The year is 1775; Michael Rowen (the brilliant Charles Hallahan) is a tough Irish immigrant who survives by his wits and his rifle.

What he covets most is a sylvan plot on the Cumberland Plateau; to get it he will coldly murder friend or foe, and trick the native Cherokees with pox-tainted blankets.

In "The Courtship of Morning Star," the landed Michael abducts a Cherokee woman (Lillian Garrett-Groag). This brutal union produces a son (Scott MacDonald), and the seeds of a familial feud that echoes the "Oresteia" of Aeschylus, and Eugene O'Neill's later version, "Mourning Becomes Electra."

"The Homecoming" (set in 1792) and "The Ties That Bind" (1819) enmesh the Talbert family and the black Biggs clan in the Rowens' fight for that ol' devil land. Blood spills between fathers and sons, neighbors and strangers. And "eye for an eye" revenge always follows.

Here, and in the Civil War-era "God's Great Supper," Schenkkan keeps the viewer riveted with a series of corkscrew plot twists that recall Lillian Hellman at her sharpest. The switchback scheming reaches its zenith in a tension-filled scene where the Rowens are stripped to sharecropper penury one asset at a time.

Part I of "The Kentucky Cycle" ends with a horrific account of young Jed Rowen's (Tuck Milligan) stint with the notorious Confederate general, William Clarke Quantrill: family feud becomes national feud. In Part II, the wider world further encroaches on the backwoods holler, and the karmic wheel flips the Rowens from haves to have-nots.

In the lyrical "Tall Tales," circa 1890, a stranger (Gregory Itzin) cons the family out of their land as surely as their ancestor conned it off the Cherokees. But when the land goes, so goes some of the play's momentum.

By 1920, Schenkkan has the Rowen descendants leading the good fight for a coal miners' union. But the strike plot of "Fire in the Hole" feels standardized, and rife with stock images: the saintly Jewish labor organizer, the spirit of Mother Jones hovering over the miners.

"Tablesalt and Greed" recovers some of the earlier snap in the intricate 1950s dealings between a Rowan who is the local mine union president, a Talbert mine owner (Michael Winter) and a Biggs (Anthony Lee) who is a powerful black entrepreneur.

But the sequence ends with a very contrived explosion. And the play's finale, "The War on Poverty" tries to tie up many loose ends and themes too neatly - while dredging up a final image right out of Sam Shepard's "Buried Child."

"The Kentucky Cycle" ends on a note of purgation and redemption, for the scarred earth of Kentucky and the people who have inherited it. The impulse is sound, but Schenkkan has the gifts to reach that epiphany more honestly.

There's work to be done here, but "The Kentucky Cycle" can already be counted as an achievement for the Intiman, for Shennkan, and (not least of all) for the actors who lend their roles flesh and spirit. In addition to those already mentioned, add to the honor role Ronald Hippe, Demene Hall, Jillayne Sorenson, and Patrick Broemeling.