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All the Drama: The Kentucky Cycle, 1992 Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Drama
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All The Drama is hosted by Jan Simpson. It is a series of deep dives into the plays that have won The Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Pulitzer Prize for Drama: “The Kentucky Cycle“1992 Pulitzer winner “The Kentucky Cycle”,
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Jan Simpson
The year is 1992. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the previous year has left many Americans with a renewed belief in their country's exceptionalism, the idea that the US Is special and destined to play the leading role in global affairs. At the same time, the early stages of globalization are making other Americans nervous as more companies move manufacturing jobs to other countries, leaving growing numbers of middle class and working class people in the US to deal with fewer jobs for non college grads here and stagnant wages for those jobs that do remain. The debate over how the country should move ahead plays out in that year's presidential election that not only pits the Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush against the young New Democrat Bill Clinton, but gives a surprising boost to third party candidate Ross Perot, who argues that both major parties are failing voters. And in that year of 1992, the Pulitzer Prize for drama went to Robert Jenkins the Kentucky Cycle, a nine play chronicle that charts both the intertwined histories of three families in Appalachia and the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be an American. My name is Jan Simpson. Welcome to all the Drama, a podcast about the plays and musicals that have won American theater's highest accolade, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Kentucky cycle begins in 1775 when a scheming settler named Michael Rowan kills a Scottish trapper who has been trading with the Cherokee people so that he can take over that business. He also tricks the tribe into giving him the rights to a large plot of land, kidnaps, rapes and impregnates a native teenager and intentionally infects her tribe members with smallpox so that they will be less of a threat to him over the next 200 years. Those violent acts will haunt his descendants, as well as those of their native relatives and the black slaves the family later acquires. The Rowans will go on to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War, lose their land and become sharecroppers, work in the mines once coal is discovered in the region, try to organize a union to combat the companies who are destroying the land and its people, and all the while they will continue to struggle the ghost from their past. The Kentucky Cycles started out as a couple of one acts that Schenken wrote after he took a trip through eastern Kentucky in 1984 when he was working at the Actors Theater of Louisville. Over the next few years, many hands would help to shape those short works into the full nine play cycle. It was nurtured at New Dramatists and the Ensemble Studio Theater here in New York. And as Schenken did more research into the Appalachian region, the play grew into a two hour, six hour saga that was workshopped at the Mart Taper Forum in la, the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven and the Sundance Institute in Utah. Finally, in 1991, the play got its world premiere at the Intamont Theater in Seattle. As you can imagine, a nine part six hour play was a mammoth undertaking. Audience members had to devote two evenings to take in the whole thing. The 21 actors in the cast had to play over 70 parts, transforming themselves into the children and grandchildren of the people they had just portrayed in earlier scenes. Intamin had to raise an additional $125,000 to fund the production, and even then the theater could only afford to do the other plays in on a single set that had to be used by all of them. Some Kentucky writers complained that the cycle traffic in stereotypes portraying the state's people as backwards, violent and out of step with the rest of the country. Others accused the cycle of being politically correct with all the white people being portrayed as bad and all the people of color as victims. Nevertheless, the five man Pulitzer jury recommended the play for the drama prize over such stiff competition as David Felshu's Miss Evers Boys about the infamous 40 year Tuskegee study that neglected to treat or even tell the black men it was studying that they had syphilis and August Wilson's two trains running the part of his 10 part American cycle series set during the civil rights years. My friend, the late Time Magazine theater critic William Henry iii chaired that year's jury and Bill, who had been a champion of the Kentucky cycle almost right from the start, wrote that it stood above all the plays the jurors had considered because it was at once polemic and poetic. His recommendation letter applauded the play's revisionist take on the myths Americans tell about the country. It also acknowledged that the play was melodramatic. But Bill wrote, every sudden reversal contains both a surprise and an implicit moral without ever losing the freshness of the story to be enjoyed for its own sake. It was the first time that the award was given to a play that hadn't yet been seen in New York. And it wasn't until a year later, on November 14, 1993, that the Kentucky Cycle opened on Broadway at the Royale Theater, now known as the Bernard B. Jacobs on 45th Street. Its cast featured Stacy Keach as Michael Rowan and three of his descendants in what became a breakout performance for Keech. And the cast also included a young Patrick Page as a member of the ensemble in what was his Broadway debut. But the play closed after just 33 performances. Even after the the producers relaxed their ticketing policy to allow people to buy tickets for the separate parts of the cycle instead of requiring them to buy both. There was a lot of speculation about why the show, which had been well received elsewhere, did so poorly in New York. Some people said the New York critics didn't like being scooped by the Pulitzer jury. Four of the five jurors were critics, but none worked for a New York newspaper. Others said that New York theatergoers just didn't care about a story set in rural America. Gordon Davison, who had produced the play at LA's Mark Taper Forum, said it might have done better if it had been presented by another nonprofit subscription house instead of on Broadway, where it was dependent on reviews. The New York Times critic Frank Rich was not a big fan. The show's producers said they had considered doing that but took the commercial route after the nonprofit they approached turned them down. But many others felt that the Kentucky Cycle was hurt by the critical and popular excitement that had greeted Angels in America when it opened on Broadway in May of that same year. They said that audiences weren't ready to deal with two epics that required them to spend so much time and money. The Kentucky Cycle was nominated for Drama Desk, Outer, Critics Circle and Tony Awards, but it lost all of them to Angels in America, which would also win the Pulitzer Prize for drama the next year, in 1993. The Kentucky Cycles afterlife has been challenging, too. In 1995, HBO announced that Kevin Costner would direct and star in a miniseries version of the plays. But the next year it said that Costner had moved on and was working on another project. The network said it would look for a different director, but it's now 30 years later and the series still hasn't been made. And because of its size and the resources required to mount it, stage productions are now primarily done by university drama programs. But the show's playwright has been far more successful. Robert Frederick Schenken Jr. Was born on March 19, 1953, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The third of four sons born to Jean Gregory, an actress, and Robert Frederick Schenken, who spent a large part of his career as a professor in the department of radio, Television and film at the University of Texas at Austin. The younger Schenken got his BA in Drama from the University of Texas in 1975 and an MFA in Theater Arts from Cornell University in 1977. He went right to work as an actor in Oath New York, where he did small roles in Off Broadway productions, including some for Shakespeare in the park and in la, where he got guest parts in such series as Star the Next Generation, Louisiana Law and Santa Barbara. But he also wrote plays, and after the success of the Kentucky cycle, Schenken stopped acting and devoted himself entirely to his writing, including more than a dozen plays and screenplays for such films as the 2002 adaptation of of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which starred Michael Caine, and 2016's Hacksaw Ridge, which earned six Academy Award nominations. And he did TV shows too, including four episodes of the HBO miniseries the Pacific, which received two Emmy nominations and a Writers Guild award. Still, Schenken is first and foremost a man of the theater. He was the first playwright to be commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for its American Revolutions Project, which showcases plays about significant moments of change in American history. Schenken's all the Way, which focuses on Lyndon Johnson's efforts to push through the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, debuted at the festival in 2012 and won both that year's AKA Steinberg Award for Best Play and the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama inspired by history. All the Way then went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play and a Tony for Bryan Cranston's portrayal of LBJ when the play opened on Broadway in 2014, where it ran for 131 performances. Its sequel, the Great Society, premiered at the Oregon Festival in July 2014 and on Broadway in 2019 with Brian Cox's LBJ, but it ran for just 72 performances and received no nominations. After Donald Trump won his first term of office in 2016, Schenken wrote a play called Building the Wall in just one week. The Two Hander was set in the then near future, in which an African American historian interviews the white former head of a detention center for illegal immigrants who was awaiting sentencing for committing serious crimes against the people who were in his charge. It was produced 50 times around the country in just its first year, with Schenken taking a hands on approach by calling artistic directors and asking them to consider the play because he felt it was so important to get its message out. And this month, January 2025, his political satire Old Cock, about Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the fascist dictator who ruled Portugal for 40 years, is making its debut as part of New York's under the Radar Festival. So it is a great honor for me that Robert Schenken agreed to find time in his very busy schedule to talk with me about the start of it all, his Pulitzer winning play, the Kentucky Cycle. He is as passionate and thoughtful as his plays. And so our interview is a little longer than some others may have been, but I think you'll find it as fascinating as I did.
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Robert Schenken
Hello, Robert Schenkin, welcome to all the drama.
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Well, thank you. It's very nice to be here.
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I want to start off by asking you if you remember how you got the news that the Kentucky Cycle had won the Pulitzer Prize.
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I was living in Los Angeles at the time I was nominated, so I knew it was a possibility, but I certainly didn't hold any assumptions about what the result would be. And I had been informed that the, the official release by the Pulitzer committee in New York would at a certain time. So I, you know, starting to stay calm and wait for the hour to arrive. And about 20 minutes before, 30 minutes before, I got a phone call from then critic for the Los Angeles Time to say how did it feel to know that I had won the Pulitzer Prize? I said, well, I didn't know that I had. How do you know? And he laughed and he said, well, they actually posted it before they formally announced it. So I just got a jump. And so he had actually beat out everybody for some kind of some weird clerical or bureaucratic kick with the committee. And that's how I heard. And he had been a supporter of the play, of course, and the centerpiece of the mark taper forums 25th anniversary season. And so it was lovely to hear it from him.
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Why did you, if you remember, why did you choose Kentucky? You aren't from Kentucky. And a lot of the issues that the play deals with could be located in other parts of the country. So why couldn't Kentucky?
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Well, you know, I, I, I think oftentimes as a writer, maybe most of the time our stories pick us, not the other way around. I was an actor, writer. I happened to be at Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville and doing a play, a new play that was set in, in eastern Kentucky. One of the great things about that theater is that there's a, there's a bar in the lobby and so after a show you can go down and drink with the audience, which is always interesting. And I was there and this gentleman introduced himself, said how much he enjoyed the show, my performance, which of course immediately marked him as a man of considerable taste and sophistication. And it turned out that he was a doctor, a pediatrician who had had a practice in, in eastern Kentucky. Very interesting is the stories that share with Me challenges of providing health care in this part of the state. But, and I'm always very careful to say this, you would have found similar situations in East St. Louis or in Rio Grande Valley, in Texas or Bronx or in East Los Angeles. So not to put Kentucky in situation. Anyway, he said that he was actually going to go back and visit the town that he had lived in and what was left of his practice. What he had done, which was quite novel for the time. Transportation was very difficult in that area. So he created a system of nurse teams and four wheel vehicles who would drive out into the hawers, make contact with families. It was a very, very successful program for not a lot of additional funding, but it was very controversial in its day. And he was attacked on all kinds of fronts and communists, but he was returning. I'd never been in that part of the world, had a free weekend. I said sure. So we drove out. It's a beautiful part of the world, Eastern Kentucky. These are very old mountains, green, lush, some extraordinary vistas. And then you turn a corner and the other half of the mountain might have been strip mined away. Your listeners have never seen the consequences of strip mine. It's staggering. They come at, chop down all the trees, pull out all the stumps and then bulldoze the topsoil off the topsoil, fertile soil. And then they dig out the bedrock to get out the coal. The coal in that part of the world is often in a very soft stone. And that then being exposed to the weather and the rain, leeches kind of soft, mild sulfuric acid which bleaches the landscape. It looks like the moon. It's devastating. So the difference between the lush landscape on the one hand and the saloon or landscape on the other was quite shocking. But then we went out with one of his nurse teams and it was the level of poverty that I was exposed to. Poverty and deprivation, particularly as it affected young children, was really shocking. And again, you know, I could have had that experience in a lot of places in the United States. It was not unique to Kentucky, but Kentucky is where I had it. And then at the end of the day, we spent the night some friends of his, coal owner, modest operation, but very, very wealthy by local state. And it was interesting to me because I was very full of the day and what I had seen and upset about it. And his response was interesting. He was quite contemptuous of the poverty and essentially the people who suffered from it being responsible for it, that they were lazy. And so it was this combination of social factors and environmental factors. That upset me, made me angry, made me want to understand what had happened. And my friend's recommendation. My book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands by Harry Caudel. It's a very kind of classic in sociology, which is a kind of history of the region and the economic social forces that have shaped it. This is an amazing story full of extraordinary figures, moments of great triumph and tragedy. And it just felt, it just felt inherently theatrical. And I thought then that, that there was a play. And originally I thought, as I was thinking of it in terms of. Because it's a lot of time to cover 200 years, ultimately to do it in a series of short plays. And I thought maybe three plays, you know, beginning, middle and end. But as, as happens sometimes, you know, I said, stories choose you. It just grew. And because I would write something and think, well, you, you can't possibly really understand that or feel that the way I want you to, unless you feel the context. And that meant another play. And by the end of the day, I'm not employed. But this, this process of development happened over several years. But that, that was the source. I'd had this experience. I was somewhat naive individual and I had this experience and it changed me, transformed me.
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How did you decide on which time periods to zero in on or which specific events? Because as you say, it covers 200 years in the lives of these families in this area, right?
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In the lives of these three fictional families that I had created. Of the 70 plus characters in this play, there are only two who are actually based on historical figures. Everyone else is invented. That's a great question. It hinged on where I felt the kind of emotional turning point points or in this area with these people. Some things were very obvious. The arrival white settlers in their interaction with the native people, the Civil War that transformed the area, the arrival of the coal barons in eastern Kentucky, the rise of union. These things just, it's just so clearly vague to be told. Other things were a little less clear, but probably arose out of my now rather obsessed interest in these three families and how their competition over this land could seesaw over the decades. So it was, you know, some things were. Seemed clearly historically important and other things arose out of this very human story I was telling them. Ultimately in the process, I, I found the theme and I think that's what ultimately was the deciding factor in what you tell, don't tell. For me, the theme was this whole notion of storytelling, the idea of story evolving into mythology and this notion of an American mythos.
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So when you started it the idea of that region standing in for the American story wasn't your starting point. You started small and it grew into that.
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I started very focused on this region and its history and then came to realize pretty quickly that the experiences that these people were having here, their relationship with the land and with these larger capitalist interests as they moved in, were not unique to the area. That in fact this was not uncommon. Whether you were talking about Kentucky or Colorado, Texas oil fields or wheat plains of Kansas, there were very strong similarities here. Then all of this undergirded by the way in which we have evolved our own story about who we are as Americans and how we are as a people and what we are as a country, how we have evolved and my fascination with how story and storytelling both reveals and obscures.
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Did you write the plays sequentially or where did you start?
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I wrote what are now Plays one and six. The start six is tall tales, the introduction of coal interests into the region. And it's an interesting. Let me. Just because I think this is an interesting. So when I was doing the research, one of the things I discovered that when Standard Oil and all the other barons began to turn their eye coal fields here, they went about it in a very, very unique and kind of wickedly brilliant way. They would hire individuals, men who were excellent entertainer, storytellers, reconstructure, and they would send them on horseback or muleback into the hollers, up into the hill, make their way family to family. And their job was to spend as much time as it took, but to win the trust of these people and eventually to purchase from them their coal rights with a document now known as the Broad Form Contract, which is one of the most vicious legal documents in American history. This document, you have to realize these people who are signing this are for the most part illiterate and unsophisticated. The document, not only, not only were they selling their coal, but they were giving the corporations license to do whatever it took to recover that coal. So cut down all the trees, remove all the soil, enormous pits, take vines, and then the company was A, not responsible for any of the environmental issues that result. It's not their problem to restore any of them, and B, the taxes on that property, and this is particularly Malal, the taxes on that property were the total responsibility of the original landowner, not the company. So when I read that, this notion of this warm, cheerful, inviting guy coming into somebody's home, winning their trust, I mean, it was just such a brilliant theatrical notion. That's how that play happens. So I Wrote play six and play one and thought there would be a third in this. As I've said, it grew beyond that.
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Did it worry you as it began to grow about who would do this growing?
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It did. It did. You have to understand, I'm an actor, principally supporting my young family as an actor and writing in my free time, in my spare time. And I would share the work with friends and they would say, well, God, this is wonderful, but who's gonna do this? Who is gonna produce this? You know, by now six hours and. And I would always, very confidently, maybe with more confidence than I felt, but would say, well, look, it only takes one person. And that is indeed the case. We have fascinating development history pretty much all over the country.
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I was going to say a lot of people said yes to you.
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Well, a lot of people said yes to the development part of it. They didromedous Ensemble Studio Theater, New York Ensemble Studio Theater, Los Angeles, Long Wharf. Ultimately, Mark Taper Forum came in and actually gave me two very critical workshops. And here's what's interesting about that. I'm working on the Kentucky cycle very much at the same time that Tony Kushner's Working Angels in American were actually working at some of the same developmental places. Sundance, for example, and the Mark Tape Reform, our respective commission support culminated in a workshop of the piece, each of our pieces in its entirety, for Gordon Davidson, founder of the Mark Taylor. And at the end of that, Gordon Davidson passed on both. He did not pick up the option on either Kentucky Cycle or Angels of America. So we had no. We had no production. So my director Warner Shook and I went out to the handful of theaters that we knew thought might be able to get in. And I got one of my favorite rejection letters, which was from Old Globe San Diego, which said, this is extraordinary. We've never read anything like this. It's amazing. When you get a production, please let us know. We would really like to see it. So the last theater we sent to the smallest theater was the Intamont Theater in Seattle, run by a wonderful actress and director and producer, Liz Huddle. And Liz got the script on a Friday. She called us Saturday morning. She said, I have to produce this. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to produce this. And she did. We got a very, very generous, in fact, the most generous at its time, grant from the fund from New American Plays. And that really made it possible for us to have rehearsal length that we needed to manage this. And so we opened air in Seattle. And in the process of this rehearsal, I came to the realization that this is really what I want to spend the rest of my career, rest of my life doing, writing, not acting. And that's when I quit acting full time.
- [32:45]
Jan Simpson
You know, that brings me.
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Robert Schenken
I should say. Sorry, I should say that we got this astonishing review in Time magazine and Gordon Davidson flew up to see the show and immediately said he wanted to make it the centerpiece of the 25th anniversary season, actually. Mark, table. So we did eventually have a happy, happy ending with the taper. You know, I've had so many people come up to me and say, that play changed my life. For that play may go into this really quite astonishing and very humbling and very gratifying. I think the play still has a lot to say to where we are, maybe even more today.
- [33:35]
Jan Simpson
I think you're right.
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Robert Schenken
It has a lot to say today. As much as it had to say then, maybe even more. More today. It seems unfortunate because, and I think because of its size, that we don't get to see it more.
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I think, you know, part of that is at the time I wrote it and for many years thereafter, I wasn't living in Newport. And that's. That made a difference. You know, one of the remarkable things about the awarding of Pulitzer Prize here at Kentucky Cycle, it was the first time in the history of Pulitzers that a play had won which had not had a production in New York City, had not had a Broadway production. The Broadway production followed the important now that would go on to become actually quite common. But it was very, very new. And to my way of thinking, it was a recognition of a change that had actually been underway in American theater for a couple of decades, which is that the focus of new play development had shifted. And it wasn't just New York any longer, but people, writers were creating, using remarkable, astonishing, important work outside New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, all over the country. And that was a sea change. I suspect that New York critics were all that happy about it.
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You're talking about the reception here in New York and the. The unfortunate shorter run than one would have expected. But I also wonder if today, in today's economic situation, where people are favoring solo shows or a big show is considered to have six or eight actors, a show of this size is unlikely to be. To be done.
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It's challenging. But I will say that every theater that I know produce this play has had a great experience with it, not just in terms of audience, but in terms of economics, that they. That it's been A successful show, but you, you, you have to put your mind to it. Yeah, but I'm sure we'll see. I'm sure we'll see a revival here in Christ.
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I hope so.
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As it is, it continues to be produced in smaller things across the country. It has a life.
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A lot of winners of the Pulitzer, it sort of freezes them. This clearly didn't happen to you because you've gone on to make a lot of award winning work, popular work, but in the immediate time, did it make it easier or harder for you to go on and write your next pieces?
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Actually struggled with the next play. I had a play that I was writing and I just couldn't get the second act and had a couple of developmental experiences that were very unsatisfying, disappointing in fact. And I stopped writing for the theater for two years while simultaneously the Pulitzer had opened up other writing avenues for me and I was now writing television. So I didn't stop writing, but I did have this hiccup in terms of theater. And it, it was a series of very good friends who reached out to me. Eddie Murphy and Atlanta invited me to come down and workshop that play that I had given up on. And I did a workshop there and eventually a production. And then.
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Which play was that?
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This is called Handler. And then shortly after that, I had a visit from a dramaturg from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival who said, what are you doing? What's up? Well, I got this play which I really like. I didn't have a very satisfactory world premiere of it, but I'd sure love to see it. She said, well, let me see it. So I sent it and then she shared it. Libby Apple, who was artistic director, I think we should do this. And I was thrilled and Libby put me together with a director at her company. And then Libby and this director had a falling out. And Libby called me and said, I have, I have some good news and some bad news. I will give me the bad news first. She said, well, I've had to fire your direct. I'm sorry, wasn't going to work. I, but I have somebody I think you're really gonna like. He's the nicest guy in theater. And that was Bill Rauch. And so this play became the first play that Bill Rauch directed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And it was brilliant production that inspired evening. It's still, if you talk to people in the subscriber list, their favorite productions at osf, this still recurs even years later. But I made a lasting friend in Bill. And then Bill became the artistic director of osf. And then I had a home again and Bill and I would to do the two LBJ plays overlay.
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And I was going to say that many people will associate you with all the Way. And one of the things I found interesting right from the Kentucky Cycle through Building the Wall is you are one of the few of our leading playwrights who takes on current issues. And I was just wondering why you think we don't see more of those kinds of plays.
- [40:22]
Well, I don't know. I don't. I think they're a little out of fashion in American theatre. It's quite opposite in British theatre. They're a mainstay of theater and theater tradition there. And I'm not quite sure why, why that would not be true. I think these play, this kind of play sometimes gets a bad rap that's undeserved. History all the Way was an extremely successful play in its day. It broke all existing box office records and went on to have a very, very good life. So I don't really have a good answer for that. But as I say, you know, my stories choose me and I don't worry about popular or unpopular or au courant or not. Just write the story all right and plays out how it plays out.
- [41:18]
Well, those of us who appreciate theater that challenges us to think about where we live, how we live really appreciate those plays choosing you and your and you're bringing them to life. I want to thank you very much for taking the time to look back at the Kentucky cycle and talk to us about it. Really, really appreciate it.
- [41:45]
My pleasure.
- [41:48]
And thank you for listening. I hope you'll come back next time. And if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please send them to me@janbreadwayradio.com.