Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes

Notes on The Kentucky Cycle

Notes on The Kentucky Cycle Gurney Norman The following notes represent a set of thoughts that have been accumulating since I first read The Kentucky Cycle in 1992.I At that time the play had already won approval by audiences and critics alike after performances in Seattle and Los Angeles. Within months the play would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for 1992. I didn't like the play at all. Even though I consider myselfto be a "Left Liberal Democrat;' with a long history ofidentification with a range of liberal issues and causes, I resented the play's plodding recitation of"progressive " and "correct" positions. My chief complaint was that it was just not a good drama, even though many knowledgeable theater professionals reported that technically the staging of the play was innovative, even radical. It interested me greatly that, even as the play conquered the West Coast theater world in 1992, in Kentucky, where I have lived most ofmy life, there seemed to be no awareness of it at all. Clearly The Kentucky Cycle had created an interesting cultural, political, and artistic situation, one that continues long after the play folded in New York after a few performances. My purpose in publicly criticizing the play in 1993 was to try to generate awareness and discussion of The Kentucky Cycle in Kentucky. That remains my purpose in continuing to discuss it these years later. When Robert Schenkkan's play The Kentucky Cycle opened at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in August 1993, ten or twelve Kentucky teachers, journalists , and writers went to see it. Most of us were friends and colleagues of various sorts who had been talking about The Kentucky Cycle since photocopies of the manuscript began circulating across Kentucky and down through the Appalachian mountain region in the summer of 1992. Our responses to the play had been mixed. Most of us had an appreciation of Schenkkan's earnestness , of his intellectual ambition. He is surely at work on serious ideas in The Kentucky Cycle. But his use of Kentucky history, of the experience of my family and the families of most of the early critics of the play, was misplaced. I resented Schenkkan's basic view of our region's history. His gaze not only came from a 328 ~ Gurney Norman position ofpresumed cultural superiority, it was a naive, unconscious practice of "Orientalism," as Edward Said has established that term. I resented Schenkkan's presumption ofhis right to appropriate the history ofeastern Kentucky for his own "artistic" use and political agenda without any consideration of the effects of that use upon the people who live and struggle in the social matrix he viewed in such a limited way. IfSchenkkan had approached theAppalachian region with the clear intention to exploit its natural and human resources, it would have been another matter entirely. That approach is one of the oldest, most familiar stories in the mountains. People are quite used to it by now in the way urban people get used to smog. But Schenkkan wants to make a "progressive" statement in which the banners ofenvironmentalism, feminism, antiracism, anticolonialism-no end of"isms" in The Kentucky Cycle-are waved above the lives and struggles ofan indigenous local people who, in Schenkkan's eyes, are "disassociated" and who suffer"povertyofthe soul:'2 There are many problems with The Kentucky Cycle, including the problem of the negative "hillbilly" stereotype, but to my mind, the problem offaux liberalism, abstract "elite" liberalism, is the basic weakness of the play and the reason it requires continued analysis. The portrayal ofKentucky mountain people as passive victims offate (indeed , in Schenkkan's view, as people so dumb, greedy, and shiftless that they have caused their fate) truly astounded me. For some reason, this representation was met with enthusiastic approval by the West Coast audiences. But anyone with one degree of real, local knowledge about eastern Kentucky would know how false that representation is. In the very years in which Schenkkan was writing his play, from about 1983 to 1990, eastern Kentucky and the southern Appalachian region were sites of some of the most dynamic examples of creative civic participation, in the spirit oftrue democratic liberalism, in North America at the time. In those years, several decades of grassroots political and cultural organizing efforts by ordinary local citizens, working people, came to fruition. The most dramatic political victory by Schenkkan's "disassociated" Kentucky mountaineers suffering "poverty of the soul" came in 1988 when...