[Van Doren was a highly respected and prolific American poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, editor, and critic. In the following review of Green Grow the Lilacs, he asserts that the play's predictability and lack of plot development allow the audience to focus on Riggs's use of the dialect of Oklahoma.]

Much has been made of the novelty which Lynn Riggs slipped into Broadway through one of its many side doors when the Theater Guild last week put on his Indian Territory folk-play, Green Grow the Lilacs. … It was indeed a novelty, but I suspect that the discussion of it has for the most part lacked the proper emphasis. There has been a tendency, for instance, to say that Mr. Riggs with one puff blew artifice out of the theater, replacing it with the strong, free, natural air of life as it is lived, or was lived, in one very real portion of this inhabited continent. If there was something naive and undramatic about the piece, that didn't at all matter—in fact, it made it what it was, and stood for nothing less than a guaranty of the author's sincerity, and if his desire to bring a full-bodied population into the region of thin wings.

But Green Grow the Lilacs was packed with devices that are very old on this or any other stage; it thronged with easily recognizable properties; it was one of the least natural pieces imaginable. The hero, for instance, was a cowboy—and might not one have expected that he would be fine and hearty, rough but good, with a grand flow of words on every occasion except that of his wooing, when of course he would be stricken dumb? Might not one have foreseen, given as setting an Oklahoma farmhouse, the presence there of somebody's old aunt, a woman with a kind and knowing heart but with a pretty tart tongue? Couldn't one have looked forward to seeing a lovely, timid heroine threatened by a dark, designing villain with a dirty mind—a hired man, perhaps? What would be surprising about the arrival of a Jewish peddler with a derby on his ears and with a pack of trinkets at his feet which he gesticulatingly recommended? Might there not also be a fat, ridiculous neighbor girl whose gaucherie would contrast with the rather miraculous grace of the heroine, though both were farmer misses? And wouldn't such a contrast make a pleasant parallel to the contrast already established between the sunny-hearted cowboy and the dark-minded hired man? Nor would a rustic dance be out of order, or a set of local songs.

Of such things was Mr. Riggs's piece composed. Which is not saying at all that it was anything less than it should be. It should have been, and decidedly was, a play that could be thoroughly enjoyed in the theater. The theater is not an exhibit hall for nature, it is hardly convertible into a museum of ethnology. Mr. Riggs must have known very well what he was about when he refrained from taxing the powers of his audience's attention in the mere matter of plot. He made his story conventional so that we could be free to listen to his language. That was his novelty, and that deserves the praise. I haven't the slightest idea whether the speeches he put into his people's mouths were authentic or not, nor do I care; but I know that they were good to hear—rich, full, and carefully flavored. After the first few minutes, in which they seemed a bit forced, we became accustomed to them and soon got to listening for only them. It is really an event on Broadway when the audience grows interested in the language of a play. In that sense Green Grow the Lilacs was a triumph, and an important one.…