Theater: Ritual and Realism

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

From moonlit skirmishes between pioneers and Cherokee to daylight thievery by speculators and tame judges, from Civil War marauders to union-busting goon squads, from the last gasp of industrial fever to the fresh air of environmentalism -- Robert Schenkkan's THE KENTUCKY CYCLE, playing at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, aspires to no less than a history of the U.S., spanning two centuries in seven hours. If his view of the past is cruel, his factual grounding is solid. But what makes the work so hauntingly memorable is a poetic impulse, not a prosaic one. He confines the action to the same few hundred acres of his ancestral Cumberlands, telling a nation's story in terms of feelings for that patch of land among three families intertwined by treachery and revenge. Warner Shook's staging vividly mixes ritual and realism. While Schenkkan is far better at incident than character, Charles Hallahan and Tuck Milligan enact just the sort of rogues whom descendants go on talking about. The plays strive for mythic power -- and attain it. W.A.H. III