 Press Room:
The Kentucky Cycle
(Parts I & II)
Tickets on sale now
On Stage & Screen:
The allure of the cycle
By Jonathan Spencer
As press time loomed for this issue of the
Willows Theatre Review, I’m sure that many of you -- and I as well --
were readying yourselves mentally for an appointment with a certain
fast-approaching dramatic saga!
OK, it was probably Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows, but I’m certain some of you were beginning to
wonder what this whole two-part epic play The Kentucky Cycle at the
Willows is all about.
Well, it’s not your garden-variety theatrical
experience, that’s for sure. It is part of a small but exciting genre of
theater that most playgoers haven’t experienced simply because such projects
are so hard to produce anywhere outside of Broadway, London’s West End, or
college drama departments– the multi-play cycle.
 But though you may not have yet attended a play
cycle, you may have experienced something very similar. In 1977, millions
of Americans sat down in front of their televisions every night for a week
to watch the massive multi-generational drama Roots, based on author
Alex Haley’s popular genealogical novel about his African-American ancestors
and their rise from slavery. And a year or so before that, the TV “miniseries”
was born with the 12-hour multi-part presentation – once a week -- of Irwin
Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man, which also launched the careers of actors
Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss.
A play cycle is much the same thing – and usually
much shorter. And you may have even heard of some of them!
A DICKENS OF A ‘NIGHT’ AT THE THEATER
 The most notable play cycle is David Edgar’s
adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Life and Adventures of Nicholas
Nickleby by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Spanning eight hours,
presented over two performances, it was first staged in 1980 at the Aldwych
Theatre in London and subsequently transferred to Broadway in 1981, where it
had a wildly successful limited run at the Plymouth Theater. Combining
Dickensian social realism with modern theatrical spectacle and a good dose
of genuine heart, the production achieved the twofold goal of exposing
audiences to the social consciousness inherent in the novel while lifting
their spirits with its message.
Edgar saw three avenues of success in the
production: ‘’First, it looks at adaptations in a new way. It says that a
group of people with a strong view about the world can take a work of art
and frame it and transform it in a way that makes the adaptation one not
of the original work of art but about the original work of art.
Point two ... it’s accessible; it’s not obscure.... [And] the third point is
that it was ... on the side of the underdog for the entirety of its not
inconsiderable length.”
The large ensemble cast included Roger Rees as
Nicholas, David Threlfall as his simple friend Smike, and Edward
Petherbridge as the ever-loyal Newman Noggs. Patrons shelled out $100 – at
that time a first for Broadway -- for a two-night ticket or a marathon
performance with a dinner break. It won Tony awards for Best Play, Best
Actor (Rees), Best Direction (Trevor Nunn), and Best Scenic Design and
supporting nominations for Threlfall and Petherbridge, Best Costumes, and
Best Lighting Design. The production was later specially adapted and filmed
for television and broadcast in syndication over four nights with
sponsorship provided by the Mobil Oil Company, thus gaining a much larger
audience for the work than it would have if it had been limited to its
London and Broadway runs.
Since then, the play cycle has been produced by
the College of Marin Drama Department in the 1980s and The California
Shakespeare Theater just last season.
UTOPIAN IDEALS WRIT LARGE
 Another play cycle of note is Tom Stoppard’s
recent The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays chronicling the wide
range of philosophical debates in pre-revolutionary Russia between 1833 and
1866. The plays are entitled Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage,
and the entire trilogy totals nine hours in length. The plays had their American premiere in 2006 at
the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. The cast included
Brían F. O’Byrne, Richard Easton, Jennifer Ehle, Billy Crudup, Ethan Hawke,
Martha Plimpton, and Amy Irving. The play holds the record for the most
Tony awards ever received by a non-musical production, garnering seven
awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, Best Featured Actor (Crudup),
Best Featured Actress (Ehle), and all three design awards (costume, lighting
and scenic).
The Coast of Utopia
is essentially the story of six friends, members of the so-called Generation
of the 1840s, a group of idealistic young Russian noblemen who met at the
University of Moscow during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. Their friendship,
personal tragedies, and vibrant debates bring into focus the birth of that
complex -- and ultimately doomed -- struggle to bring Russia into the modern
world.
The action of Voyage begins at the
Chekhovian country estate of young Michael Bakunin and shifts to Moscow
University, where he encounters and embraces new vistas in philosophy and
politics as well as a cadre of soon-to-be notable friends, including the
anarchist Michael Bakunin, the writer Ivan Turgenev, the literary critic
Vissarion Belinsky, and the revolutionary thinker Alexander Herzen, the
trilogy’s central character. As their dreams of change crumble under the
weight of Tsar Nicholas’s repressive regime, the first play’s end finds
these diverse and revolutionary thinkers forced to leave their homeland for
the intellectual freedom of Paris.
 Shipwreck
finds Alexander Herzen and his friends mired in a search for the Utopian
ideal. The play is set in 1848 Paris, a time of revolution and possibility
in which the famed City of Lights is finally poised to lead Europe into a
bold new era. However, the newly enfranchised French voters inexplicably use
their newborn freedom to elect a Monarchist Assembly, which ends up
repressing the very workers who had made the legislative body’s existence
possible. Herzen’s personal tragedies parallel the larger action and the
second play closes in a state of disillusionment.
The third play, Salvage finds Herzen in
London along with a community of fellow Russian exiles. He and his friends
rejoice in the news of the 1861 Russian Emancipation, which they have
struggled to effect from afar. However, the Emancipation brings to the fore
a new generation of radicals who criticize Herzen for not advocating for
faster change. Wearied by the bloody excesses of his Paris days, he calls
instead for peaceful revolution. His youthful idealism has been tempered by
time, loss, and middle age, and he is now tragically out of step with the
sentiment of these new – and dangerous -- revolutionaries.
OTHER NOTABLES
Also of interest to playgoers curious about play
cycles is David Edgar’s second foray into long-form theatrical drama –
Continental Divide, a two-play cycle about the Republican and Democratic
parties. Co-developed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Berkeley
Repertory Theatre, the two plays examine the conservative and liberal sides
of the modern American political spectrum, with their roots in the
radicalism and counter-radicalism of the 1960s. A sprawling tale of a heated
governor’s race in an unnamed Western state, Mother’s Against and
Daughters of the Revolution received mixed reviews but nonetheless
provided a fascinating look into how our country’s political landscape has
attained its current state.
Now, back to The Kentucky Cycle and
Harry Potter … and please don’t tell me how either one ends!
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