Sometimes, it just doesn't matter that a Broadway play makes people gasp, weep and stand at the end to yell "bravo."
Even with all that, the show can fail - a lesson driven home to Van Nuys playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play, "The Kentucky Cycle," closed Dec. 11 at the Royale Theater in New York."Certainly, it's a disappointment that we didn't run longer," Schenkkan said from his Valley home before flying to New York for the final performance. "But I don't feel any personal sense of failure because there's nothing I would have done differently."
The 40-year-old playwright said he's "absolutely happy" with the script presented during two weeks of previews and four weeks of regular performances in New York. He had revised the play after its production early last year at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum.
Producer David Richenthal had also talked with prospective investors so the show starring Stacy Keach could continue. However, he said earlier he expected the show to close "unless there's some rabbit that comes out of a hat."
Clocking in at six hours, the two-part "Kentucky Cycle" tells 200 years of American history through the epic struggles and skul-dug-geries of three Kentucky families. It won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for drama just 1 1/2 weeks after concluding its run at the Taper.
The prize notwithstanding, "The Kentucky Cycle" has been tough to sell on Broadway. It has been playing to audiences that fill only 75 percent to 80 percent of the theater's 1,060 seats - not enough to keep it going.
"Largely, we've either broken even or lost money over the last six weeks," producer Richenthal said from New York.
The show had used up its cash reserves, and judging from advance sales, he believed deficits in coming weeks would have been "substantial."
So he pulled the plug. The $2.5 million investment - which made it the most expensive serious play ever mounted on Broadway - has been lost.
Speculating about the sluggish box-office performance, Schenk-kan said, "I can only assume it's economic, at some level."
The top ticket price was $100 for the full, six-hour presentation - which could be seen as a bargain, considering that most Broadway shows cost $65 and are less than half as long.
Still, it's a daunting amount for many people, considering today's tough economy.
Richenthal isn't sure that's the case, however. "I think it was a question of time, not finances," he said.
The show's length - and the fact that some two-part cycles were presented over two nights - made it a risky proposition.
Rave reviews from the top New York critics might have convinced the public to show up anyway, but the show drew mixed reviews.
"The Kentucky Cycle" isn't the only lengthy, two-part play on Broadway. "Angels in America" is a seven-hour experience, consisting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Millennium Approaches" and the recently opened "Perestroika."
Schenkkan noted that "Angels" opened in two waves, however. "Millennium" opened in May and ran while "Perestroika" was being rewritten.
"It turns out to have been a very shrewd move," Schenkkan noted. Audiences could manage the 3 1/2 hours to see "Millennium," and after that, they were primed to buy another "Perestroika" ticket.
Schenkkan said the script he's working on now is "not two parts and it's not six hours," he said with a laugh. But that has nothing to do with his experience with "Kentucky Cycle."
"What I write is always just what it is," he said. "It is its own form. It is its own length."
Meanwhile, the film rights to "Kentucky Cycle" have been sold to Home Box Office.
Looking on the positive side, Schenkkan said he believes it was an "extraordinary achievement" to get the play to New York. "The whole thing has been a great ride."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
`Cycle' actor familiar to Utah theatergoers
Patrick Page, one actor in the ensemble for "The Kentucky Cycle," was well-known to Utah audiences.
Page had been scheduled to play Bolingbroke in "Richard II" and Anthony Cavendish in "The Royal Family" during this past summer's Utah Shakespearean Festival but withdrew to join the Broadway-bound cast of "The Kentucky Cycle." (His roles at the festival were taken by Harley Venton, quickly recruited from Los Angeles.)
Pages's notable Utah performances included roles in the late Doug Christensen's "Nothing Like the Sun," at the festival in 1989 (and revived for a short run in November 1992 at the former Broadway Stage theater in downtown Salt Lake, where he had previously presented his one-man production, "Passion's Slaves").
Also at the USF, he played the title roles of "Macbeth" and "Richard III," and had prominent roles in "Julius Caesar," "Othello" and "Love's Labour's Lost." His performances for Pioneer Theatre Company include King Henry in "Henry V." - Ivan M. Lincoln