Word: schenkkan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...biggest surprise came when the award for drama was announced: The Kentucky Cycle, a six-hour historical saga by the relatively unknown playwright Robert Schenkkan -- and the first play to win a Pulitzer without ever having been produced in New York City. His epic, which spans 200 years of American history as experienced by three eastern Kentucky families, premiered in Seattle last June and completed a six-week run in Los Angeles last month...
Disturbed by the growing gap between rich and poor in the U.S., Schenkkan, who grew up in Texas and lives in California, wrote the first of the nine plays that make up the Cycle in 1984, following a visit to Kentucky. "Society falls apart when the underlying myth no longer functions," he says, paraphrasing Joseph Campbell. "Now there's a quest for a new mythology, and I'd like to think this play is part of that search...
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...
...centuries partly because they are parables of good and evil. The man of good in Swop is H.E. Rowe (Ken Jenkins), an 81-year-old who communes with nature, wears hawk masks and goes "buck-dancin' " with his favorite deer. The man of evil is Lanny (Robert Schenkkan), a mean-spirited drunk and a cancerous coward of a man who relishes dashing a kitten to death against a wall. A surprisingly animated wooden Indian presides over the pair's rendezvous with destiny...