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America Needs Hillbillies The Case of The Kentucky Cycle Finlay Donesky Anyone familiar with The Kentucky Cycle has likely heard a variation on the following story, the essential details of which appear in most articles and reviews about the play. On a wet spring day in 1981, a twenty-eight-year-old actor by the name ofRobert Schenkkan traveled across central Kentucky from Louisville to Hazard, a town set deep in the mountains ofPerry County. Alocal physician had asked him if he wanted to accompany him as he made house calls in the area around Hazard. In the ten hours he spent in the region, Schenkkan witnessed environmental abuse from strip mining and disparities between wealth and povertythat lefthim feeling shocked,outraged, and puzzled. In the author's note to the play, Schenkkan describes the poverty ofa family living in a "holler" that he found especially memorable: Their house was a single-room "shotgun shack" with a tin roof, a dirt floor, and a coal-burning stove. It was situated on what looked like a combination garbage dump and gravel pit. The mother, who couldn't have been more than sixteen or seventeen, had two children below the age of two, one of whom was crippled. The father, not much older than his wife, was unemployed, with little training and few prospects. The smell in that house was what my friend with grim humor referred to as "the smell ofpoverty in the mountains"-as though you had taken a corn-chuck mattress, soaked it in piss, covered itwith garbage and coal, and set it on fire.l Schenkkan also visited a successful coal operator living in a palatial home on top ofa mountain who, when asked about the plight ofhis poor neighbors, said, "these people are lazy-stupid-and that's why they suffer."2 At this point in his story in the Bobbie Ann Mason interview, Schenkkan says, "I just knew I was mad. And I was upset. I didn't understand how this could be-it was just so incongruous. This guy who was so blase, to put it politely,aboutthe extremewant ofhis neighbors:'3 Schenkkanwas also astounded 284 ~ Finlay Donesky by corresponding incongruities in the landscape. Lush mountain forests full of flaming dogwood and azalea would suddenly give way to vast heaps ofcrushed rock and mine tailings left by strip miners. In Schenkkan's words,"It just looks like the fucking moon:'4 He returned to his home in southern California with feelings of rage and the desire to find out how and why such poverty and environmental ruin had come about. He began his research by reading Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963), a pioneering study that drew the attention ofthe country to the devastating impact of the coal industry on the land and people of eastern Kentucky. Schenkkan also credits the writings ofJoseph Campbell for helping him realize that what he saw in eastern Kentucky was the consequence of dangerous myths at the heart ofAmerican society. He calls them the "Myth of Abundance" and the "Myth of Escape;' which together form the "Myth of the Frontier:'5 He believes America is headed for "ruin on a grand scale" if it continues to pretend it can forever escape the consequences ofplunderingits natural resources as if they were inexhaustible. He believes such ruin can be averted if Americans face up to the destructive dark side of the American Dream. "One of our big problems," he says, "is how much we're in denial about our past, and how unwilling we are to examine our past and to come to terms with it. There's a river of loss that runs through the bedrock of this country-as deep as any seam of anthracite in Eastern Kentucky:'6 The Kentucky Cycle thus appears to be a cautionary tale with eastern Kentucky as a paradigm oftheAmerican experience. In the two-hundred-year saga of three related families-the Rowens, the Biggs, and the Talberts-the play traces cycles of violence, greed, revenge, and betrayal that epitomize the mistakesAmericans must acknowledge before theycan move on and embrace myths that encourage responsibility and preservation. Schenkkan's visit to eastern Kentucky followed up by his gift ofconcerna cautionary tale in the form of a play--enacts a pattern of response Appalachians have seen repeated innumerable times during the past one hundredyears. Ever since Will Wallace Harney visited the Cumberland mountain region and published his impressions in 1873 under the...

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