"Going Over Jordan" the cast sings, against an abstract background of soon-to-be-varying colored sky over barren trees and earth. So opens a tale of intertwining families, beginning with the ruthless Michael Rowen (Patrick J. Clarke, in his fittest Asolo performance to date). He kills an Indian trader and, after trickery, the Indians themselves, sparing only Morning Star, whom he rapes and cripples into subjugation so he'll have a son. (Tessie Hogan gives great intensity to both her hatred of Rowen and her ever-doting love of his child.)
Dual aspects of this succession are metaphorically reflected in a powerful double-image staging of the birth, whereas repeated references to the later birth of a daughter are kept shaded. Son Patrick is a chip off the old black-hearted block, reflected by Steve Wilson, even when he's courting Stephanie Burden's naively sweet Rebecca Talbert. They will unite their two families' histories, told in five episodic "plays" (sometimes more like dramatized narratives) in the first half of Schenkkan's Cycle.
Despite fine performances and business creating the illusion of dramatic action, there's no real protagonist and certainly none for a viewer to side with. Everyone's bad or shallow and meets, greets, stabs or shoots or cheats the next character, with the seemingly one-upping but really greedy Rowans getting taken for their land due to debts or speculators who reduce them to sharecroppers by end of play five. There's even a revelation that a black servant and her son (attractive Allen Gilmore) are related, she having been raped by ancestor Michael. It's quite 19th-century melodramatic when not being a travesty of an old Indian play or a bloody horse opera.
Granted, the theme of the destiny of the land, along with the families bound up with it, is an important one. Asolo Theater Company tries hard to make the variations of this theme appear worthy of a Pulitzer, but a good try, unfortunately, isn't the same as a success.
