SIX-HOUR DRAMA IS WORTH
EVERY MOMENT:
'The Kentucky Cycle' spans
200 years of family conflict
BY MARTIN F. KOHN
FREE PRESS THEATER CRITIC

These days your sprawling multigenerational saga is usually found in the novel or the miniseries, not on the stage. The theater may have enough room for a long and winding tale, but today's theatergoer may not have enough patience.

Congratulations, then, to the Hilberry Theatre, whose 6-hour, 20-minute staging of "The Kentucky Cycle" trusts in the intelligence (and gluteal fortitude) of Detroit audiences. At such a length it's understandable why Robert Schenkkan's two-part, nine-play chronicle of 200 years of America's history in a particular place is the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama that almost nobody has ever seen. It requires an unusual commitment of resources by theater and audience, a commitment that this production repeatedly rewards.

Area playgoers are atypically experienced when it comes to a long day at the theater. In 1988, Hilberry's "Nicholas Nickleby" ran some eight hours and remains a cherished memory.

In 2001 the Royal Shakespeare Company's 9-hour day of Shakespeare's three "Henry VI" plays attracted sellout crowds at Ann Arbor's Power Center. Like "The Kentucky Cycle," "Nickleby" and "Henry VI" could be seen in a single day with meal breaks or over two days. Part 1 of "Kentucky" runs three hours; Part 2, three hours, 20 minutes.

"The Kentucky Cycle," which begins in 1775 and concludes in 1975, contains what may be the finest two hours of theater this season: the two one-act plays that constitute the first act of Part 2 (in basketball terms, the third period). The equivalent of a full-length play anywhere else, "Tall Tales," which takes place in 1890, and "Fire in the Hole," which takes place in 1920, present a gripping story of exploitation of land and people as coal mining comes to this particular corner of eastern Kentucky. It is not, nor has it ever been, an unspoiled corner, not since the arrival of human beings.

In the first play of Part 1, "Masters of the Trade," it is 1775, the Cherokees have run the Shawnees off the land and the white settlers, masters of savagery, run off the Cherokees. In Schenkkan's Kentucky nobody is innocent, at least not for long. "The Kentucky Cycle" is a vicious cycle of betrayal, brutality, 100-year-feuds, lying, cheating, killing, mutilation, greed, slavery, war, rape, patricide and child murder, not necessarily in that order. Any resemblance to Greek tragedy is surely intended. Survival is never pretty, Schenkkan seems to be saying, but what else is there? And the final play in the cycle, "The War on Poverty," which takes place in 1975, does bring some relief. All 200 years of "The Kentucky Cycle" are seen through the eyes of a settler named Michael Rowen and his descendants as they interact with another white family named Talbert, a black family named Biggs and many other characters, including a couple of actual historical figures: the unspeakably cruel Confederate raider William Quantrill and the heroic labor organizer Mother Jones.

"Directors Pat Ansuini and Lavinia Hart and their cast, the entire Hilberry company plus a couple of youngsters, have taken on a massive task and mastered it. It's difficult to single out a mere few of the actors for kudos, but among the praiseworthy are: Jennifer Tuttle in two very different roles -- Morning Star, a Cherokee woman in the 18th Century, and Mary Anne Rowen Jackson, a coal miner's wife fed up with grinding poverty in the 20th and determined to do something about it. Nick DePinto in two equally different roles -- a vicious, pompous, incompetent Confederate officer and a heroic organizer for the United Mine Workers.

Carly Germany as matriarch of the Biggs family, under different names over more than a century. Josh Eikenberry, playing the worst of the worst as family founder Michael Rowen and Civil War raider Quantrill, and the more complex Joshua Rowen, last of his line, in 1975. Rich in plot and densely populated, the sprawling narrative makes individual character development especially challenging, but these and other actors, under Ansuini and Hart's skillful direction, convey the playwright's profound sense of time, place and tragedy.