I think it’s a general consensus throughout the classroom that Robert Schenkkan, author of The Kentucky Cycle, is a nincompoop. He is not Appalachian, had only spent a handful of days in Appalachia as part of a tour, and yet he took it upon himself to write this masterpiece about Appalachia and its people. I’m sure you’ll hear about how horribly he misrepresented mountain people from my classmates, so I’ll just discuss his shortcomings from a literary point of view.
As an unbiased reader, I rather enjoyed The Kentucky Cycle. The plot was interesting—murder, intrigue, and greed always are. It kept me engaged, and I found myself clambering through the pages faster and faster, trying to get to the end. Part of what had me flipping pages was the desire to know how the events that just occurred would affect the next generation. Choosing to follow a single family through multiple generations and years was a good approach to the play, especially considering its major themes. So kudos to Schenkkan.
He loses points, however, for his characters. They are certainly fascinating entities, that cannot be denied, but they are too one-dimensional. Schenkkan picked the worst traits and focused solely on those. This is understandable in the face of the prevailing theme, but still not acceptable. He presented stereotypes—stock characters. The hillbilly, the old fashioned coal miner, the abusive husband, the cheating husband, the greedy mountain man…the list just keeps going. In a well told story all characters should have many facets, but not even Schenkkan’s protagonists had that extra something that made them seem human. On the other hand, with the way the characters were presented, I’m not even completely sure there were any protagonists. But I digress. The point is Schenkkan wrote a play about stock characters. Anyone in theater will tell you that is a huge no-no. The characters should be complex individuals. They should seem so real that the audience expects to walk out of the theater and actually encounter the character in real life. A play about one-dimensional characters will always fall flat, just short of the best it can be.
-J
2 comments:
the kentucky cycle does lack character, but by him focusing on the negitive side of people it kept you reading. it was just a way to entertain the reader.
Theater, especially sensational plays like The Kentucky Cycle, has to be caricatures rather than characters. Audiences don't sell out venues to see characters who are realistic and boring. They go to see the sociopaths and the unstable, the endless drama with its impossible-yet-inevitable happy ending, or to see most of the players perish.
On stage, characters cease to be one-dimensional. When each character is played by a real person, whose sole focus is interpreting the character and making that interpretation come to life, it all seems much more real.
-M
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