Book Report: The Kentucky Cycle

Considering it won the Pulitzer and all, I had heard very little about The Kentucky Cycle I spotted it on a friend’s coffee table and tricked her into offering to lend it to me. In fact, I had quite low expectations. I knew it was about poor rural Kentuckians over a couple of hundred years, and figured it was—not tedious and schoolmarmy, because that wouldn’t win the Pulitzer (probably), but crude, anyway. And, of course, as a suave and urbane (although far from louche) City Boy, rural Kentucky is a foreign country, without any of the exoticism of India or China.

Well, it’s a great theater work. Yes, I was a little fidgety during the first part. I didn’t really care whether a particular family of nasty, small-minded, vicious, racist, violent, mean-spirited, horrible, ugly ... where was I? Anyway, I didn’t really care whether the land stayed in their hands or not, and although I grant that Robert Schenkkan did a fine job of showing us that they cared, and why, and how, and all, that didn’t rise to the level of greatness for me. It was only in the second part that it got to me. The patriarch of that era, like all the family, is nasty, small-minded, vicious ... anyway, he manages to flimflam himself into selling mineral rights to the flimflam man fronting for the big mining company. That’s a wonderful scene. Then the daughter (who did not manage to get herself seduced by the flimflam man back in the first scene, but it’s close) gets caught up in the union movement, in a really chilling, frightening and powerful bit of labor propaganda. I mean, Your Humble Blogger eats that stuff up with a spoon, as you know, Gentle Reader, but this is really fine. Then, half a generation later, the union has lost its way, and the union bosses and the managers come together to protect the status quo, the status quo that’s deadly, corrupt, and doomed to change (as everything else is, too). The last scene, an odd combination of sentiment and grim defeatism, doesn’t (I think) rise to the level of the previous three, but it isn’t a cop-out, either.

All that is from reading the thing. I doubt I’ll ever get a chance to see it on stage in its entirety, but I’d like to see if it stands up to actually being produced.

I can’t quite bring myself to close the note, though, without pointing out that the bastard mine-owners, and the bastard union-bosses left in complicity with them (although I understand that the unions that didn’t let bastard collaborators run them were crushed, with the help of our national government and the Republican Party and the bastard collaborators in my own Party) are still killing mine workers, and are still killing them, and are still fucking killing mine workers to make a buck.

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.