The Kentucky Cycle

THIS SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN The Kentucky Cycle Gurney Norman The first issue ofAppalachian Heritage was published at Alice Lloyd College , Pippa Passes, Kentucky, in 1973. Albert Stewart was the founding editor. This year we begin our twenty-first year ofpublication. We are lookingforward to 1993; throughout this year we plan to celebrate our two decades ofsuccess. For twenty years, Appalachian Heritage has been a primary forum for the discussion ofideas concerning life in the Southern Appalachian region. It serves as an outletfor the region's established writers as well asfor those seeking to be publishedfor the first time. There is never a shortage ofideas and issues for a magazine such as ours to publish. We received a submission from Gurney Norman about The Kentucky Cycle just as we weregoing to press. We believe that Gurney's view on the play deserves wide reading.—Sidney Farr As anyone who pays attention to American theater already knows, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama went to a play called The Kentucky Cycle, by Robert Schenkkan. The play dramatizes aspects of Eastern Kentucky history over the 200-year period from 1775 to 1975. It is a nine-act epic-scale drama that takes six and a half hours to perform. The Kentucky Cycle was first performed in Seattle, Washington, in 1991. In early 1992 the play, mounted by the Intiman Theatre Company , moved to the Mark Taper Forum in Lost Angeles for an extended run. The play has not yet been performed in the East, making it one of the few plays, if not the only play, to receive the Pulitzer Prize without first being seen in New York. Critics who saw the play in its West Coast performances were effusive in their praise. Some called it a classic; others placed it in the pantheon of the great American plays of all time. Audiences seemed to respond the same way, according to published reports. By all conventional standards, The Kentucky Cycle is a monumental success. It is obviously a powerful theater piece whose force will be felt in theater and perhaps film and TV circles for years to come. Most of the writers and reviewers who commented on The !Kentucky Cycle in print, including author Schenkkan, averred that, even though the story is based on the history of Eastern Kentucky's land and people for 200 years, the play really isn't "about" them. Instead, they said, The Kentucky Cycle is "a metaphor" of the experience of all of America, particularly of America as a ruined place where the land and water and natural resources have been destroyed and the human spirit devastated beyond any possibility of a hopeful view of the nation's future. No acknowledgment is made, either in the program notes or in published comments by the author, of the consequences that such a dark view of a fictional Eastern Kentucky will have on the people who live there— encompassing as it does the general sorriness of people, and their plunder , pillage, rape, hatred, and murder. It is at this point that a controversy has arisen over the degree to which the play works to construct the reality it describes. Is the play, in liberal guise, a part of the evil social and economic processes it describes? Is The Kentucky Cycle an example of cultural strip-mining practiced by forces from the centers of national power upon land and people "at the margin"? In more specific, practical terms, will this play work to increase or decrease the likelihood that Eastern Kentucky will become the dumping ground of the nation's garbage? Which side is it on? Can a play which may be rich in production values, powerful in its spell-binding quality in a theater, a play which is well-acted and which an urban audience may find deeply moving, still be seriously flawed because the language of the play is foreign to and unworthy of its subject and because the vocabulary of the characters is arbitrary and in no way inevitable as natural speech? If the author is looking at Kentucky's most famous tragedies as metaphors, have Kentucky people been reduced to objects and their intimate experiences manipulated...