Playwright: Robert Schenkkan
At: Infamous Commonwealth Theatre at the Old Speakeasy, 4139 N. Broadway
Phone: 312-458-9780; $20
Runs through: May 18
You don't know about Robert Schenkkan without you have seen a play called The Kentucky Cycle—a grim, humorless, six-hour marathon recounting how, for two centuries, American imperialists turned his beautiful state and everybody in it to shit. Unsurprisingly, it won the Pulitzer prize in 1992. In Chicago, Pegasus Players' 1997 production scored that company a record-breaking nine Jeffs and, later in 2006, Infamous Commonwealth Theatre's revival added another four to the accolades showered on this self-abasing jeremiad.
So why shouldn't a playwright repeat the formula that proved so successful before? Not another miniseries-length epic, necessarily, but a kind of Kentucky Cycle-lite. More laughs, for one thing, and a shorter running time. The result premiered in 2005 as Lewis And Clark Reach The Euphrates, a dramatic account spanning the years from the Louisiana Purchase to the present day, its performance time clocking in at a relatively brisk two and a half hours. Its heroes are a pair of nebbishes named for the explorers of the recently-annexed property. And its theme—you guessed it—is how we Yankees rape, rob, pollute and pretty much screw up everything we touch.
'People pay me for my point of view,' Schenkkan admits in the playbill for this Infamous Commonwealth Theatre production, 'I have an axe to grind.' Audiences of similarly sanguine bent, coming to this material fresh—if the assertion that the U.S. sucks can be news to anybody these days—might find in the author's lament some insightful commentary on our well-deserved national guilt. To be sure, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, as played by the engaging Stephen Dunn and Craig C. Thompson, emerge as suitably naive comrades time-traveling through history from San Juan Hill to Bataan to My Lai to Baghdad, all the while swearing allegiance to the ideals of their president, Thomas Jefferson.
But playgoers looking for a hint of reversal in the psychological dynamic—conflict being necessary to generate emotional suspense and/or rational debate—are in for a disappointment. We quickly come to anticipate yet another instance of white men behaving badly toward their 'ethnic' brethren, the latter depicted as either pathetically innocent or comically crafty, without the simmering anger of a Larry McMurtry or the savage ridicule of a Mel Brooks. By the final buzzword-riddled speeches, the drone of Schenkkan's whetstone has drowned any indignation we might have mustered up, along with any impulse to inquiry engendered thereby.
