Word: schenkkan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...enough to sell The Kentucky Cycle on Broadway. The $2.5 million production, one of the costliest plays ever, closed last week after only 34 performances. Hobbled by mixed reviews, the purse- straining (top price: $100), butt-busting (two parts, six hours) epic never found an audience. But Robert Schenkkan's drama still has life: HBO has bought the rights and will do a TV version...
Fortunately for playwright Robert Schenkkan, the decision is in the hands of playgoers rather than the ever cautious powers that be. An unknown until The Kentucky Cycle won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 based on a production at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, he has stubbornly held to his vision and remained loyal to the cast -- many at journeyman level -- who first gave it life. They have finally rewarded him with performances mostly worthy of their roles...
Many audience members will be tempted to say that The Kentucky Cycle is an unbalanced portrait of America. But historically it is real. More convincing, it is wholly real in Keach's playing. He and Schenkkan have tapped into our darkest and most denied national memories...
DURING THE DECADE IN WHICH HE taught himself to be a playwright, actor Robert Schenkkan, 40, went long stretches without work, uprooted himself from New York to California, grew politically inflamed and endured the deaths of his mother and, especially agonizing, his stillborn first child. "We lost a lot of friends because of their inability to deal with our grief," he recalls. "They seemed to think we should be quiet and move on. But I look at the whole world through that lens now, and it gave me the theme of denial, of misguided forgetting, that runs through my work...
These nine plays spanning seven hours -- and two centuries -- aspire to nothing less than a history of America, mythic in scale yet humbly rooted in the evolving fate of the same few hundred acres of Kentucky. Playwright Robert Schenkkan proves a spectacularly vivid revisionist, underscoring the violence, exploitation, multiracial antagonism and unchecked injustice of our past. Produced at Seattle's Intiman Theater and Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, this was the first Pulitzer Prize drama not seen in New York City and is thus a triumph for all regional theater...