[Krutch is widely regarded as one of America's foremost literary and drama critics. A conservative and idealistic thinker, he was a consistent proponent of human dignity and the preeminence of literary art. In the following essay, he asserts that although The Cream in the Well "is good it is not quite good enough to meet the requirements of the most difficult and exacting of dramatic forms.']

Some ten years ago when Lynn Riggs's Green Grow the Lilacs was a current production of the Theater Guild its author was commonly set down as a more than usually promising young playwright who had chosen to cultivate the "folk play" rather than any one of the other more popular genres. Broadway has not been especially hospitable to the folk play (vide Paul Green), and despite two subsequently produced works Mr. Riggs rather fell out of sight. Now he has reappeared with an extremely ambitious and solemn piece called The Cream in the Well.… Here the time is 1906 and the scene Indian Territory—which is familiar ground for the author. But The Cream in the Well is not really folk drama. It is, in intention at least, high tragedy. It does not, that is to say, exist for the purpose of exhibiting the "manners" of a particular scene but for the sake of the passions portrayed, and Indian Territory in 1906 is merely a local habitation. The scene might be New York City or Singapore without essentially changing the play, and, as a matter of fact, the remoteness and relative unfamiliarity of the setting tend only to make the whole seem almost abstract.

The central character is the hellion daughter of a benevolent and hard-working farmer couple on a Cherokee allotment. Before the play begins she has already succeeded in separating her brother from his fiancee and in sending him upon an adventurous as well (one gathers) as a somewhat debauched career with the United States Navy. During the action she further succeeds, before her ultimate suicide, in driving the deserted fiancee to her death and in making a drunkard out of the weakling she herself has contemptuously consented to marry. Rather early in the play the audience has begun to realize what, it later appears, the principal parties concerned also understand, namely, that the girl is in love with her own brother and that her malice springs from conflict and frustration. In fact, near the end, the brother actually suggests that it would be better for them to yield to their impulses, that even unnatural love is less destructive than hate. But she is not able to face that possibility and prefers self-destruction instead.

Mr. Riggs writes, not only with obvious sincerity but also on a rather high level of literacy and competence. The result is that he holds the interest and commands respect. Yet it is impossible not to feel that the whole thing is somehow gratuitous, to ask what the play "means," why it was written, what it is ultimately "about." I have already said that it is not a folk play whose raison d'etre is the presentation of a local culture. Neither is it primarily a psychological study, since the interest is not really centered in the psychological problem. And that leaves one asking for the sake of what it does exist.

Mr. Riggs, to be sure, might reply with a rhetorical question. "What," he might ask, "do Oedipus and Agamemnon mean?" "What, for that matter, did Mr. O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms or his Mourning Becomes Electra mean?" Such questions, however, suggest their own answers. Obviously it is not necessary for a play to "mean" anything in the sense in which the word is here being used, provided that the passions revealed are really convincingly intense to a superlative degree. But they must be intense and convincing for beyond anything that is necessary in another kind of play. We easily grant our cooperation to the writer who is managing to amuse us. We demand somewhat more if he is presenting an interesting thesis, if he is proposing to demonstrate some truth we want to know. But we demand most of all of the author who invites us to a high tragedy. We resist it as we resist all things which are even superficially unpleasant or painful.

What's Hecuba to us or we to Hecuba? As the tired business man says, we have troubles enough of our own. We must, if the tragedy is really to succeed, be caught up and carried away in spite of ourselves. We must find ourselves concerned whether we want to be or not, too moved to ask why we should care. And if Mr. Riggs commands respect and holds attention without quite stilling question or complaint, the reason probably is simply that though his play is good it is not quite good enough to meet the requirements of the most difficult and exacting of dramatic forms.…