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- <text id=92TT0319>
- <title>
- Feb. 10, 1992: View Points:Theater
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- Feb. 10, 1992 Japan
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- VIEW POINTS, Page 76
- THEATER
- Ritual and Realism
- </hdr><body>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p>By William A. Henry III.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-