The Kentucky (Re) Cycle

Abstract

The Kentucky (Re) Cycle Jim Wayne Miller Focusing on the fortunes of the Rowen family from 1775 to 1975, Robert Schenkkan's controversial nine-part Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Kentucky Cycle presents an unrelieved picture ofviolence, greed, and rapacity. In the first play, "A Dark and Bloody Land," set in 1775, Michael Rowen, a murderer and runaway indentured servant from Georgia , acquires land from a band of Cherokees. The transaction involves his giving the Indians blankets infected with smallpox. A year later (1776), in "The Courtship of Morning Star," Michael Rowen takes a Cherokee woman as his wife, cutting a tendon in her leg to prevent her from running away. Their child Patrick Rowen figures centrally in "The Homecoming" (1792). Land-hungry like his father, Patrick wants to marry Rebecca Talbert, daughter of another settler, and inherit part of her father's land. In the presence of Rebecca and her father Joe Talbert, and his mother, the Cherokee woman Morning Star, Patrick kills his father Michael. He then murders Rebecca's father, banishes his mother, marries Rebecca, and takes over the Talbert land. Patrick's fortunes change in "The Ties That Bind" (1819) when he loses his land to Jeremiah Talbert, son of the murdered Joe Talbert and brother to Patrick's wife Rebecca. Patrick and his sons are reduced to working the land as sharecroppers. In the fifth play, "God's Great Supper," Rowens and Talberts take part in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Jed Rowen, a sharecropper grandson of Patrick, allows his landlord, Richard Talbert, to drown in a river crossing. After the war, mineral rights are at issue, and in "Tall Tales" (1885) J. T. Wells, a storyteller and agent of coal interests, succeeds in getting the Rowens to sell the mineral rights to their land for a ridiculously small sum. During World War I both the Rowens and their enemies the Talberts are involved in the coal industry. In "Fire in the Hole," the seventh play, Roger Talbert Winston is a mine owner while the Rowens are forming a union of mine Jim Wayne Miller, a poet, essayist, and lecturer, teaches at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. 59 workers. Joshua Rowen is head of the United Mine Workers in "Tablesalt and Greed," set in 1954. His son Scott is killed in a mine explosion. By 1975 Joshua Rowen and James Talbert Winston are old and broken men. In the ninth play, "The War on Poverty," they survey the destruction of their land and lives while robbing a grave in the vicinity of the original Rowen homestead, perhaps the grave of the Cherokee woman Morning Star. Although The Kentucky Cycle is set in "that part of Eastern Kentucky known as Appalachia," the author and some critics and reviewers1 suggest that the play isn't really about Eastern Kentucky, its people and history, but is instead a metaphor for the American experience generally, a way of suggesting how greed, violence, and indifference to the environment have devastated the land and the human spirit. Gurney Norman summarizes an objection to this interpretation of The Kentucky Cycle when he asks whether the play is not, in the liberal guise of compassion and caring, "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'? . . . 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?"2 Reading the play and some of the critical comment it has evoked, I have a sickening sense of déjà vu. There is nothing new or challenging here, as one might expect from a work that is the recipient of a prestigious award. As a dramatic work it is unwieldy; consisting of nine short plays, it is intended to be performed in two parts, either in two consecutive evenings or during an all-day performance with a dinner break. The cycle seems better suited to the format of a television miniseries like Alex Haley's...