Lynn Riggs: Southwest Playwright
[Erhard is a prolific American playwright, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt from his critical biography of Riggs, he surveys Riggs's career as a playwright.]
Knives from Syria was staged successfully by the Santa Fe Players in 1925 and became [Riggs's] first published play in 1927. A slim one-act comedy with a deus-ex-machina ending, Knives from Syria was nevertheless important as a preparatory work. In the play Mrs. Buster, a widow, says her daughter (Rhodie, 18) must marry the hired man (Charley, 33). But Rhodie wants to marry an itinerant Syrian peddler. Charley, breathless, comes in one night and says someone has tried to kill him; tension builds as Charley goes off in the dark to seek his assailant. The peddler arrives, acts mysteriously, and shows off his collection of Syrian knives, "good for cutting the throats of men." Mrs. Buster, terrified, permits Rhodie to pledge her troth to the peddler. But when Charley announces that the would-be killing was just a joke by some of his friends, Mrs. Buster finds herself backed into a corner; she has given Rhodie to the peddler. The play ends with the implication that Mrs. Buster can now have Charley for herself. Everyone, presumably, will live happily ever after.
Although Riggs handles the suspense well, characterizations are thin, and the comedy is only mildly amusing. The playlet, however, shows us a genial middle-aged woman without a man, a romantic young woman, a hired man, a peddler who is both mysterious and comic, and a group of young men bent upon playing tricks in the dark. Thus one can find in this early play the seeds of Green Grow the Lilacs. The romantic young girl also appears later as the main character in Roadside, where the braggart hero reappears as a wandering Texan instead of a Syrian peddler. The play not only anticipates Riggs's best works, especially with its theme of beauty in rebellion, but it echoes earlier folk drama as well. The anthologist S. Marion Tucker reminds us that Knives from Syria strongly resembles John Millington Synge's In the Shadow of the Glen.
Encouraged by his play's success … Riggs began an incredibly active five-year period in which he wrote almost a dozen plays. His first full-length play was The Primitives, a satire on life in Santa Fe. Unhappy with it, he destroyed the script; but in 1925 he also wrote Sump'n Like Wings and Big Lake, both full-length plays. In the fall of 1926 Riggs returned to Chicago, where he almost managed to get Knives produced; failing, he accepted Kenneth Macgowan's invitation to come to New York, where he wrote A Lantern To See By. He spent the summer of 1926 on playwright Hatcher Hughes's farm in Connecticut. Producer Otto Kahn optioned Sump'n Like Wings, and Riggs received a $500 advance. He wrote home exultantly, "When the play opens, of course, I begin making $200 or $300 a week for as long as the play runs.… I am quite happy of course that at last I am to be what the world calls a success, and that I have done the thing I like best." But Kahn dropped his option, and the play was never done in New York. Again and again in the following years, Riggs thought he would have a hit in New York, only to meet disappointment. Riggs stayed solvent in 1926 by writing for the First National Motion Picture Company in New York.
Riggs did reach New York (but not Broadway) when Big Lake, a poetic tragedy, was staged by George Auerbach at Richard Boleslavsky's American Laboratory Theatre on April 8, 1927. The now-renowned critic and scholar Francis Fergusson had a bit part, and Stella Adler, later one of the Group Theatre's most famous actresses, played the major role of Elly. The ALT was a highly considered semiprofessional experimental troupe, and Riggs received considerable notice. Sidney Howard, the noted realistic playwright of the 1920's, offered Riggs much encouragement. Barrett Clark recommended him to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Riggs was the first Oklahoman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. Riggs became known as one of the most promising American playwrights, unaware that the tag would come to be more curse than blessing.
Big Lake, a simple, powerful tragedy, shows youthful sensitivity snuffed out meaninglessly by evil. In the first part, subtitled "The Woods," Betty and Lloyd, two high school students, have come out to Big Lake in rural Oklahoma before dawn in order to be alone with their romantic fancies before their class holds a breakfast picnic. Betty becomes terrified: "It's like the woods wuz waitin' … to git us." Betty wants to find a rowboat, to escape the terror of the woods, but Lloyd suggests instead an old cabin nearby.
In the cabin are Butch, a bootlegger who has stabbed a man; and his mistress, Elly. Butch, afraid that his victim did not die before giving evidence, tells Elly he will use the two young people for an alibi. But Elly is strongly moved by the innocent appearance of the young people; and when Betty and Lloyd borrow their rowboat, Elly urges Butch to save the young people: "Wuzn't you ever jist startin' life? Wuzn't you ever innocent and good … you cain't kill a thing like that." When the sheriff arrives, Butch shouts that the murderer has taken a girl onto the lake to rape her. The sheriff and his deputies rush out; when Elly calls Butch a beast, he replies, "Mebbe I am one … this place we're livin' in—what's it? It's the woods, Elly. It's the dark woods."
In the second portion of the play, subtitled "The Lake," the sheriff shoots Lloyd from the shore, and Betty falls overboard and drowns. The play ends with Elly saying slowly, "It's alwys the way … boats leak, guns go off … they's wild animals—sump'n happens, sump'n alwys happens. It cain't be helped."
The inevitability smacks of Greek tragedy; and there is rich irony in that the lake, symbol of beauty and freedom to the young people, is actually more murderous than the threatening woods. Symbolically, one theme is loss of innocence. The evil in the woods (everyday life) overtakes innocence even out on the lake (the romantic world that people would like to live in). Although melodramatic, Big Lake avoids excessive sentimentality. Burns Mantle, reviewing in The New York Daily News, said, "If you foster any belief that you are a real student of the theatre this Big Lake is one of the exhibits worth your study." He added, "Big Lake gives young Riggs a definite place among the native poets with a feeling for drama. Almost anything may come of this developing talent." Barrett H. Clark, in his 1928 Study of the Modern American Drama, called Eugene O'Neill, Paul Green, and Riggs the equal of any of the European dramatists. And at that time Rigg's reputation rested solely on Big Lake.
Two months after the production, Riggs went to Yaddo, at Saratoga Springs, New York, for the summer. There he wrote his one-act play Reckless, which was later to become the first scene of the full-length Roadside. He also wrote The Lonesome West, an autobiographical drama which featured a domineering stepmother and three sons who try to get away from the farm. Producers praised the script, but it was not actually produced until 1936, when the Hedgerow Theatre gave it a few performances. In the fall of 1927 Riggs returned to New York City and wrote Rancor, the story of an ambitious woman who becomes trapped in marriage to a weak farmer in isolated rural Oklahoma. The play was produced on July 12, 1928, at Hedgerow, and was one of its more successful repertory offerings.…
Sump'n Like Wings is the story of Willie Baker, a beautiful young tomboy and coquette chafing under the rule of her mother, who runs the restaurant in her uncle's hotel in Claremont (Claremore). The time is 1913. Willie runs off with a married man who gets her pregnant and deserts her; and in Act Two Willie is back home again, once more enduring the restrictions set up by her mother. Frustrated, Willie runs away a second time. But again she is deserted, her baby dies, and Willie returns to a rundown rooming house of dubious reputation. Willie's uncle tries to talk her into coming home, but Willie refuses: "There's more to life than sump'n to eat and a bed, I guess … they's sump'n in you 'at has to be free—like a bird, or you ain't livin'." The play ends with Willie barricading her rooming-house door with chairs in order to keep the drunken males out. There is hope that Willie will finally become her own woman, but Riggs provides a superb irony: Willie, who was always locked in by her mother, now must lock herself in if she is to have any meaningful freedom. The simply plotted plays says, with some effectiveness, that people are always locked in, somehow, by someone, even if only by themselves.
Buoyed by nibbles from many producers on several plays, Riggs next wrote A Lantern to See By in 1928. This powerful play was also optioned for Broadway, but was dropped before rehearsals could begin. As with Sump'n Like Wings, it was published and later produced at the Detroit Playhouse on September 25, 1930. Broadway was not opening its doors.
A Lantern to See By is a tragedy of the old Indian Territory, near Claremore, and shows the darker side of the rural Southwest. Jodie Harmon is the sensitive oldest son in a large farm family, and he resents the way his often-drunk father brutally treats his mother. The father (John) smashes Jodie in the head with a pinch-bar and tells him that the only way anyone gets anything in life is by fighting for it. The mother dies. Jodie falls in love with the young Annie, who comes in as housekeeper, and he goes off on a road job to earn money to marry her. His father takes Annie as a mistress, however; and when Jodie returns, a play-party is in progress and Annie has just learned that John does not intend to pay wages for her varied services.
Jodie, infuriated because his own wages had been sent back to his father by his employer, responds to Annie's angered goading and kills his father with the pinch-bar. Jodie shouts, "I had to. He'd a-killed me. He's been akillin' me—all my life—slow." Jodie gives himself up to the hushed guests. Despite the stark ending, a ray of hope is left open when one of the guests says Jodie will not hang but only go to jail.
Felix Sper, in his fine book on regional theatre From Native Roots, has noted the similarities between Lantern and Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms. Lantern has catharsis at the end and has comic relief (which O'Neill often found difficult) in the squabbling early scenes of the many brothers on the farm. Tension is maintained throughout, and the simply plotted, highly unified script moves rapidly. Further, the play attains poetic power because of its myth-like theme straight out of basic folklore: the son must kill the father in order to become a man himself. By setting the play in one of the more primitive backwaters of American civilization, Riggs achieves a folk play of no small effectiveness. Not surprisingly, however, no one in New York has ever staged the play.
The year 1928 brought two additional recognitions to Riggs. The August issue of Poetry Magazine printed eight of his poems, and the Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to travel and write in Europe. He wrote a one-act play, On a Siding, which he later destroyed; and in late 1928 began Green Grow the Lilacs in Paris. Annoyed with the climate, he moved south and finished Lilacs on the Mediterranean coast early in 1929. While there he began Roadside, which he finished in New York late in 1929.
Suddenly everything seemed to fit together for Riggs, and he appeared on the verge of a spectacular writing career. He went to Hollywood in the spring of 1930 as a screenwriter for Pathe Pictures and wrote a war movie, Beyond Victory (starring James Gleason), one of the early talkies. Later he did the movie script for The Siren Song. He wrote home, "If we get a good director, I'm hoping it will be a sensation." He then summered at Provincetown, where he began writing The Cherokee Night. On September 25, 1930, A Lantern to See By opened in Detroit; on September 26, 1930, he had his first Broadway opening with Roadside; his book of poems, The Iron Dish, came off the press; and later that fall the Theatre Guild put Green Grow the Lilacs into rehearsal.…
Roadside is the most high-spirited of all Riggs's plays; and critics have remarked on its frontier humor that relates it to the folk literature of Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and to the writings of Mark Twain. Alan S. Downer, in his Fifty Years of American Drama, even says it "might be described as the great American comedy." It is both a tall tale and a takeoff on a tall tale. Riggs himself said of it, "It is a comedy about the impossible dream man has always had: complete freedom, the right to be lawless, uncircumspect, gusty and hearty, anarchic, fun loving, chicken-stealing if necessary (for where there is no ordinary morality, there is of course no crime)."
The comedy takes place in the Indian Territory, near and in Verdigris Switch, in the summer of 1905. Hannie, "a buxom girl of twenty with black-snapping eyes and a rich earthy humor," has run away from her timid farmer-husband, Buzzey, and is once again crossing the countryside with her father, Pap Rader, in his covered wagon. "Men is s' crazy," she says. "Some wants to set on a farm till they dry up and blow away—like Buzzey here. Or some wants to go streakin' across the country, hell-bent for high water—like Paw. If they was jist a half-way crazy man who liked to streak, and liked to set—both. A nonsensical strappin' man who had a good time settin' or streakin'—but who had a good time." This man of course does turn up, in the person of Texas, who has just torn the roof off the Verdigris Switch jailhouse. "I hate rules, and I hate fences," he says, and tells his new friends that Texas was named after him. "I ain't ever been licked by mortal man. Onct a whole crowd of mortal men—cowpunchers—tried to lick me, and they was seventy-three of 'em by count, and they all had shootin' arns." This is as American as Davy Crockett and as universal as the braggart warriors in ancient classical comedy.
Hannie has a comic love duel with Texas; and, disconsolate at thinking he has lost her, Texas allows the marshal to take him back to Verdigris Switch. But in the court-room again, when Texas realizes that Hannie does care for him, he breaks free once more in a manner long-since clichéd in Hollywood's Western films. "My, I like that feller," shouts Pap when Texas pops the marshal on the jaw and escapes.
Back at the wagon Texas tells Hannie, "We're sump'n alike … you're crazy and reckless and wild. You make a feller wonder big and step fur." When Hannie replies, "I'd blister you 'th my tongue ever couple of days. I'd cripple you—" Texas retorts, "I'd hate you 'f you didn't!" He and Hannie drive off with Pap. "Good-bye, you all! I bet you wish you was us!" shouts Texas, and the marshal watches with a slow, admiring grin.
S. Marion Tucker (in Twenty-Five Modern Plays) likens the play to a ballad: "Roadside is casual about exposition, about the logic of events, or about the unities. Instead, the playwright, like the ballad singer, chooses to talk most about the parts of the story that interest him—the gusty comedy of the courtroom scene, for instance, for which the well-made play could ill spare the time." Tucker adds, "The structure of Roadside grows out of its material; it is lanky, casual, and rich in speech and feeling, like its characters. Like them, it is earthy and elemental." Riggs conceived of the play first as a brief sketch of Hannie casting off Buzzey (the portion published as Reckless in 1928), and gradually built the tale into a full-length play.
Alan Downer sets Roadside into another extremely basic framework: the rebel against established society. He writes: "What distinguishes this play from the usual melodrama about the West is obviously the freshness and poetry of the speech, and the warm humanity of the characters." Downer adds that, even more important, the year 1905 was not the time of a free frontier. Railroads and farms were crowding out the wanderers; thus the theme was of serious importance. Downer concludes:
Roadside is about liberty, the liberty of individuals, about human importance and dignity. This is a subject with which modern drama has often been preoccupied, but often in terms more didactic than dramatic. By turning to folk materials, which can be felt more than intellectually comprehended, Riggs appeals to the instinct dormant in most Americans to live close to nature. He thus states his theme by indirection, by character in action awakening the nostalgia of his audience. It is not only the marshal who grins admiringly in reply to Texas' farewell, 'Bet you wish you was us!' …
Theatre Arts Monthly said [Green Grow the Lilacs] hovered on the edge of song, and Riggs himself wrote in the preface to the printed version:
It must be fairly obvious from seeing the play that it might have been entitled An Old Song. The intent has been solely to recapture in a kind of nostalgic glow (but in dramatic dialogue more than in song) the great range of mood which characterized the old folk songs and ballads I used to hear in my Oklahoma childhood—their quaintness, their sadness, their robustness, their simplicity, their hearty or bawdy humors, their sentimentalities, their melodrama, their touching sweetness. For this reason it seemed wise to throw away the conventions of ordinary theatricality—a complex plot, swift action, etc.—and try to exhibit luminously, in the simplest of stories, a wide area of mood and feeling.
Riggs also said that all his plays had a slight edge beyond realism and that he believed in the symphonic nature of a play.
Mark Van Doren, reviewing in The Nation (February 11, 1931) said, "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." Interestingly, just before the play opened in New York Riggs had written in The New York Evening Post (January 24, 1931):
The fact is that far from idealizing the poetic quality of that speech, I haven't equaled it. I have an aunt… who naturally speaks a much more highly charged poetic language than I can contrive to write.… From morning until night she will comment on the affairs of the household, on the state of the weather, on the goings-on of the neighbors, in a language that would gladden the heart of any poet who loved apt and spontaneous word-images. And this was generally true of the Oklahoma folk of thirty years ago, whom I have written about. These people talked poetry without any conscious effort to make beautiful language.… Because of the external poverty and sameness of their lives they felt the need of richness and variety in their thoughts.… I let my characters write their own speeches, the language which was familiar to my boyhood years. Whatever poetry may be found in the play is to the credit of my neighbors, not of myself.
Aunt Eller, of course, was really his Aunt Mary Riggs Brice; and Laurey was patterned on his sister, Mrs. Mattie Cundiff, the person he was closest to throughout his entire life. She was the only person to whom he could communicate his inner tensions and lonelinesses.
When we look at the script, we see that Green Grow the Lilacs is a natural foundation for the later Oklahoma! We have a gallant, romantic Western hero (Curly), a beautiful, bantering, and romantic heroine (Laurey), a comic confidante for Laurey (Aunt Eller), a melodramatic villain (Jeeter Fry), a comic supporting man (The Peddler), and extras which include a fiddler, a banjo player, cowboys, and girls. The cast of Lilacs already reads like that of a musical.
Set in the Indian Territory in 1900, the play actually opens with a song, as Curly comes to the farmhouse and greets Aunt Eller. Both the language of the song and Riggs's first stage direction, "It is a radiant summer morning several years ago," plus several other speeches about the beauty of the day provide the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein's opening Oklahomal number, "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'." Curly's first words to Aunt Eller, "I wouldn't marry you ner none of yerkinfolks…and you c'n tell 'em that, all of 'em, includin' that niece of your'n, Miss Laurey Williams," create the tone of love-duel comedy and hint of course, that Curly and Laurey will end up together. Laurey comes in, "Heared a voice a-talkin' rumbly," and we begin the first love duel. The device, popularized in British Restoration comedy, is still a staple of modern musical comedy. In his early plays Riggs was heavy-handed in his dialect use, although it reflected accurately the illiteracy of the Indian Territory settlers. But by now the language has mellowed in Riggs's memory, has become more poetic, and is only a step away from the lyrics of musical comedy.
Curly invites Laurey to the play-party at Old Man Peck's, but she has already promised—out of fear—to go with Jeeter. Curly then says he has hired transportation from over at Claremore to take her to the party: "A bran' new surrey with fringe on the top four inches long—and yeller! And two white horses a-rarin' and faunchin'… and this yere rig has got four fine side-curtains, case of rain. And isinglass winders to look out of! And a red and green lamp set on the dashboard, winkin' like a lightnin' bug!" The lyrics were already there for Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Surrey with the Fringe on Top."
In the second scene, in Laurey's bedroom, Riggs uses sentimentalism effectively as preparation for the finale when he has Laurey say, "If we ever had to leave this here place, Aunt Eller, I'd shore miss it. I like it. I like the thicket down by the branch whur the 'possums live, don't you? And the way we set around in the evenings in thrashin' time, a-eatin' mushmelons and singin'…" The Territory is idealized and softened from Riggs's earlier plays. But evil is still present, and Laurey's worry to Aunt Eller is an effective plant for later: "What if Jeeter set the house on fire … Sump'n black a-pilin' up. Ever since a year ago. Sump'n boilin' up inside him—mean."
Ado Annie and the Peddler now arrive, with the latter a direct descendant from Riggs's early Knives from Syria. Ado Annie's making up to the peddler is also an echo from Knives. The entire scene contains the basis for Annie's song in Oklahoma!, "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No."
Scene Three, in the smokehouse, home of Jeeter Fry (Jud Fry in Oklahomal), increases the tensions. Curly, resembling Texas in Roadside, tells Jeeter, "My name's Curly … I break broncs, mean uns. I bull-dog steers. I ain't never been licked …" Curly and Jeeter play cards, and we see the dark side of Jeeter, who warns Curly to stay away from Laurey. Curly replies, "In this country, they's two things you c'n do if you're a man. Live out of doors is one. Live in a hole is the other … why don't you do sump'n healthy onc't in a while, 'stid of stayin' shet up here a-crawlin' and festerin'!" Curly's comments form the basis for the song, "Pore Jud Is Daid," in Oklahomal Jeeter's characterization is not deep and is melodramatic. Riggs, in ominous moments in his plays, often turns to oldfashioned melodrama. But most musicals don't have time for in-depth characterization of villains, and Riggs provided a ready-made character for Oklahomal The first half of the play ends ominously as the Peddler comes into the smokehouse and sells Jeeter a frogsticker to "kill a frog or a bastard" with; and, as with any good melodrama, we in the audience sense that the frogsticker will be used later.
Scene Four is the play-party at Old Man Peck's, and Riggs uses three old Territory songs to open, climax, and close the scene. He has all but written in the big "production number" of most modern musicals, and Rodgers and Hammerstein had little structural altering to do as they prepared their version twelve years later. Jeeter comes in, filled with passion for Laurey; and Riggs, who usually did not aim toward "box office," used a commercial device here: the lustful passions are put into the heart of the antagonist, and the always-outwardly-proper theatre audience can root righteously against the villain. In most of his tragedies, however, Riggs either did not realize or did not choose to acknowledge the fact that audiences embarrass easily; and when he put unusual passions and desires into the hearts of his protagonists, he made his audiences uncomfortable.
Through the play-party scene Riggs effectively juxtaposes the boisterous festivity with the undercurrent of tension between Jeeter and Laurey and Curly. Laurey accepts Curly's proposal, but Jeeter's ugly, drunken threats keep the tension strong. Rodgers and Hammerstein did improve the play-party scene, but they remained extremely faithful to Riggs and his regional background. The scene in Oklahomal begins with a song, "The Farmer and the Cow Man Should Be Friends." One character says, "I'd like to say a word for the farmer; he come out West and made a lot of changes." This is countered by a rancher: "He come out West and built a lot offences … right acrost our cattle ranges." The conflict was true to life in Riggs's own boyhood; this addition in the musical does not detract from the Lynn Riggs flavor.
Another addition is an interesting improvement. Rodgers and Hammerstein have people at the party bid for anonymously prepared lunch baskets. Curly and Jud, however, learn which basket is Laurey's, and they bid furiously. Although the actual contest is for a lunch basket, it really is for Laurey herself, and it adds excellent suspense. Curly's successful bid further motivates Jud in his desire for revenge.
Scene Five, the climax of Lilacs, begins lyrically as Curly and Laurey return home from their wedding. But they are met with the bawdy shivaree, frightening enough in itself, and then by Jeeter, who burns the haystack onto which the roisterers have pushed Curly and Laurey. Curly and Jeeter fight, and Jeeter falls on his own frogsticker and dies. Melodrama, yes; but Riggs creates a rich mood from the old-time Territory customs that build plausibly into the play's climax.
Scene Six, the finale, echoes Roadside in romantic heroics. Curly escapes from jail, where he is awaiting the hearing on Jeeter's death. But in this play Riggs places the escape in the final moments instead of in the first act, and he creates additional sympathy over and above the anti-law heroics with Curly's intense desire to consummate his marriage. Aunt Eller takes over the Texas role for a moment as she outtalks Old Man Peck, who has been deputized to arrest Curly. Curly is given permission to spend the night with Laurey, and indications are that he will be cleared when he reports to court in the morning.
Rodgers and Hammerstein alter Oklahomal slightly at the end. Aunt Eller suggests that "any good law can be bent a little," and they hold an informal trial at once, freeing Curly immediately in order to eliminate the escape from jail. Thus the Oklahoma! ending is a little more clear-cut in its lightness than the almost bitter-sweet Lilacs; but Rodgers and Hammerstein undoubtedly wanted to build to a crescendo of exhilaration as the musical ended.
Riggs blends the outlaw-philosophy with the compromises necessary in a civilized country, and the freedom theme of Roadside is mellowed. In Roadside, Texas won his showdown with the marshal, and he continued to roam as the spirit moved him. Lilacs, however, shows a shift. Laurey says, "I'll stand it—if they send you to the pen fer life." Instead of the rebel Hannie, who wants to run, Laurey will stay and assume responsibility. And Curly adds, "It come to me settin' in that cell of mine. Oh, I got to be a farmer, I see that! Quit a-thinkin' about dehornin' and brandin' and th'owin' the rope, and start in to git my hands blistered a new way. Oh, things is changin' right and left … country a-changin', got to change with it." Riggs is saying good-bye to the old days of the Territory. Civilization has finally taken over.
One reviewer greeted Green Grow the Lilacs with this affirmation: "It is a folk piece of this fertile American earth … in these days we are grown-up enough to write, mount, and enjoy such pieces, to consider them discriminately. Our theater will not be full-rounded until it gives them just place" (American Drama and Its Critics). But Broadway did not give place to Lynn Riggs. He was not to attain another New York production for five more years. Lilacs was rumored for the Pulitzer Prize, but the award went to Susan Glaspell for Alison's House, the sensitive portrayal of the poet Emily Dickinson. Riggs was happy for Miss Glaspell: "I am very glad … for it will mean that her interest in the American theatre will receive a stimulant … She has the sort of creative mind that is needed in the theatre … Susan Glaspell requires this sort of encouragement to continue." Riggs, who at this time said, "It is awfully exciting to work on a play," did not receive this kind of encouragement with Broadway and its critics.
But in 1931 Riggs's future looked bright. On April 19 he had a public reading of the unfinished The Cherokee Night in the Carolina Playmakers' Theatre, then went to Oklahoma to soak up added background for further revisions of the play which was to become his favorite. While in Oklahoma he said about New York theatre: "Passion, honesty, truth and glamour have been lost in a straining after smartness, after the commercial thing." He then went on to Santa Fe for his first extended stay since 1925, worked further on The Cherokee Night, did a dramatic adaptation of James Gould Cozzens' novel Son of Perdition, and directed Rancor at the Santa Fe community theatre in December, 1931.
He finished The Cherokee Night, and Jasper Deeter produced it at Hedgerow on June 18, 1932, with Riggs directing. Never to be produced on Broadway, the play was done at the University of Iowa and at Northwestern, with Riggs again directing both of these; and in the summer of 1936 it was performed ten days off-Broadway at the Provincetown Theatre by a training unit of the Federal Theatre. Ironically, despite the lack of Broadway blessing, The Cherokee Night may, in the long run, prove to be his greatest play.
Quite different in structure from any of Riggs's other dramas, The Cherokee Night is virtually a series of seven one-act plays which depict the disintegration of the western branch of the Cherokee tribe. The story takes place between 1895 and 1931 in the Indian Territory and later the State of Oklahoma. The scenes are not presented chronologically, and in them we see some half a dozen characters at different ages in their lives. Despite the seeming jumble, however, the play is artistically unified and builds to a powerful finale, although Brooks Atkinson, in The New York Times of June 21,1932, carped at the structure when he first saw it: "'The intent of the play,' says Mr. Riggs in a program note, 'is meant to carry the play forward in space in exactly the same way as the mind … draws out of the past or future or present, impartially, the verbal or visual image which will serve to illustrate and illuminate a meaning.' Let this column state categorically that Mr. Riggs's principle is one of the worst by which a play can be written." Even as late as the 1930's, critics demanded the comfortable, Ibsenian well-made play.
Atkinson, however, was won over by Riggs's theme. His review ended, "You begin to realize that this story of a lost tribe is no isolated episode. It is the story of a world that has lost its heritage. The Cherokee tragedy is the universal complaint." By far the most poetic of all Riggs's plays, The Cherokee Night says, in essence, that for an Indian to deny his "Indian-ness" is to diminish himself as a human being. It also shows the corruption of the Cherokees by both the whites and the neighboring Osage Indians, and it shows vividly and poignantly the tormented lives and prejudice that mixed-breeds face in our twentieth century Southwest.
The opening scene shows four couples, all of part-Cherokee blood, on a picnic near old Claremore Indian Mound. Old Man Talbert, the local "crazy man," appears out of the darkness and frightens them with tales of visits that the spirits of dead Cherokees have made to him on the old mound. The spirits have chanted to him, "Are you sunk already to the white man's way … night—night—has come to our people." Subsequent scenes show how the four young couples degenerate to prostitutes, criminals, informers, ne'er-do-wells, or simply people who stagnate intellectually and spiritually. The ways of the white man, even the strongly religious, corrupt; and the most terrifying scene shows one of the half-breed young men "evangelized" by a splinter group of ardent fundamentalists who end up by chaining him in their church and torturing him. The scene is among the most powerful in all of Riggs's writing and has symbolic overtones beyond its powerful realism.
When the degeneration of all the half-breeds is complete, Riggs flashes back in the final scene to an earlier day and an Indian hut on Claremore Mound. The half-breed Spench rushes in fleeing from a white posse, and old Gray-Wolf asks him why he has committed his many crimes. Spench replies, "I tried everything. Tried to farm. Too restless. Cattle herdin', ridin' fence. Sump'n always drove me on … sump'n inside—no rest, I don't know—bad blood. Too much Indian, they tell me," but old Gray-Wolf counters with, "Not enough Indian." The posse shoots Spench in cold blood and then warns Gray-Wolf, "You Indians must think you own things out here. This is God's country out here—and God's a white man." The dead man's woman sits by the body and mourns, as the play ends, "Sleep, rest now … but here's your son. In him your trouble. It goes on. In him. It ain't finished." And the audience realizes that throughout the earlier scenes they have, indeed, been seeing the trouble going on and on, and the evils brought about by prejudice and greed. The play is still highly topical; by particularizing and showing us one small corner of the old Southwest, Riggs has shown us man in all places and all ages. This powerful and meaningful play could, in today's tense times, be a smash hit in New York if ever a farsighted producer would "discover" it.…
[Russet Mantle is a] bittersweet comedy [that] gains much from local color, being set in the portal of a ranch just outside Santa Fe, a setting that was almost home for Riggs. Four major characters face up to life in the play, and a fifth continues to hide from it. Horace and Susannah Kincaid, both about fifty and unhappy with each other, are trying to raise apples and chickens on their ranch after losing their money in the stock market crash. They host Susannah's sister, Effie, and Effie's daughter, Kay, both from Louisville. Into this household arrives the young militant poet, John Galt, seeking a job. At times the play sounds as modern as the 1960's: Horace tells John that he will soon adjust to the world, but John retorts, "The world will do a little adjusting, too … my generation will see to that. They were born desperate enough, and searching, and the taste of rage is in their mouths." John also adds, "How can I consider my own bread and butter important? My life is worth nothing, nothing at all, unless I'm part of the agony that's beating and tearing the world."
In the second act Susannah warns John to stay away from young Kay. Later, Horace does exactly the same. In the two conversations, both Horace and Susannah reveal the emptiness of their marriage and how they have put masks over reality. Kay overhears these speeches, and she and John are horrified: "They don't even know now what defeated them. They've lied to themselves so long."
As Act Three begins, Kay is pregnant by John. The assembled group tries to find a solution. Kay's mother, Effie, wants to return to Louisville and act as if nothing happened. She will wear the mask of conformity to the end. John, however, faces up to responsibility; and he and Kay prepare to go live in the world as it is. When they leave, Kay urges her Uncle Horace, "Imagine you're young again," and John adds, "And the world is beginning for you." The play ends with Susannah saying to Horace, "Let's try." Riggs's epigraph, from Hamlet, epitomizes not only the New Mexico setting but the major theme: "But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill." The play is one of rebirth, and is definitely part of the mainstream of social comedy in the Depression era that looked ahead to a better world.
Riggs was more at home with his comedy in Russet Mantle than with his serious theme. Edith Isaacs, in Theatre Arts Monthly, said, "You are a little ashamed not to have recognized before the full depth of Lynn Riggs's sense of humor." And Time said that Riggs "flabbergasted Broadway by revealing an unsuspected talent for grade A comic characterization." Stark Young spoke for the majority of critics when he said in The New Republic, "It breaks down in the serious-poetic speeches given to the young roles. The effect becomes sententious and in a tone false to the remainder of the play." Today the theme seems too openly expressed and too sugar-coated, but we must remember that the decade was not one of disillusion, and the postwar cynicism was still far in the future. It is to Riggs's credit that he said something meaningful in his comedy rather than merely providing frothy fun.…
Finished in 1938, The Year of Pihár is a powerful tragedy of an upper-class Yucatecan family and, through them, of their entire social group. The family deteriorates morally and is killed by the rebelling Indians, who regain some of their rightful lands from the earlier Spanish conquerors.
Riggs centers the play around Pilár, one of the daughters in the Crespo family, which has moved back from New York City to the old plantation after admitting defeat in trying to carve out a meaningful life in the United States. Pilár, despite a stronger idealism and higher moral code than the rest of the family, meets a rape-torture death at the hands of the Indians. As with most of Riggs's serious plays, Pihir is powerful and ritual-like. Riggs has a sure touch when he writes about primitive ethnic groups, and in this play he echoes some of the same stresses that he saw as a boy between Cherokees and whites in the old Indian Territory. The Year of Pilár is about prejudice and freedom from oppression, and it remains pertinent in today's world. Although published, it has never been staged professionally.
The play also has a strong under-theme of sexuality. Pilár is terrified, yet drawn to her orgiastic death; and many of the other characters exhibit similar split feelings of outer aversion toward sex and inner compulsion to it. Many critics have deliberately turned their heads away from this often-recurring motif in Riggs's plays; a number of them would prefer to think of Riggs solely as the writer of congenial comedies down on the farm. But Riggs was also keenly interested in the turbulent sexual desires masked under the hypocritical exteriors of most humans.…
Riggs returned to Broadway on January 20, 1941, with his most powerful play, but it was attacked by the New York critics. Martin Gabel co-produced and directed Riggs's tragedy, The Cream in the Well, in an excellently staged production at the Booth Theatre, with sets by Jo Mielziner. It closed after twenty-four performances and a damnation rarely seen in theatrical journalism. The New York newspapers had the following things to say about it: "merely a morbid excursion into an unpleasant subject" (World-Telegram); "Mr. Riggs has dropped down to the low of his career" (PM); "minor-league O'Neill" (Sun); "sophomoric tragedy" (Journal-American); "the kind of play one would be glad to forget… balderdash of a curdling sort, sadly ineffectual" (Herald Tribune); and even Brooks Atkinson (Times) asked, "Why?" Bitterly hurt, Riggs fled to Santa Fe to lick his wound for almost a year, and didn't write another line with a regional flavor for seven years.
The Cream in the Well, Ibsenian in its constantly unfolding exposition, takes place in the isolated Big Lake area near Verdigris Switch in 1906. Joseph Wood Krutch synopsizes it best:
The central character is the hellion daughter of a … 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 … as … debauched career with the … 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 contemptuously consented to marry.… The girl is in love with her own brother … and 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 ("Tragedy Is Not Easy").
Despite the sincerity and power of the play, it was condemned. Riggs had dared to write about incest; and incest was not to become "box office" until a decade later in the relaxed postwar mores. Ironically, The Cream in the Well is in good taste and is far more artistic than much of the contemporary Theatre of Violence. The play is Greek-like in its intensity and passion, and it belongs in the same category as O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Owen Davis's Icebound—inevitable tragedies stemming out of the tensions of living in rural isolation. Riggs has created his own doomed House of Atreus in the backwoods by Big Lake. The particularized regional setting provides the background for a universal tragedy. The lack of sophistication of the rural characters adds credibility as they fumble toward awareness of the explosive situation. It is not merely folk drama; it is high tragedy.
Krutch puts his finger on why the newspaper reviews joined in their cry of outrage: "We demand most of all of the author who invites us to high tragedy. We resist it as we resist all things which are even superficially unpleasant or painful" ("Tragedy Is Not Easy"). In other words, turbulent, culturally-tabooed feelings that lurk too close to home must be exorcised at once. The Cream in the Well never had a chance with the still hypocritically Puritan Broadway audiences of 1941.
Only one month after the production of The Cream in the Well, Riggs had an article in Theatre Arts in which he urged the necessity for the tributary theatre, far from Broadway. The timing of this article, originally a speech in San Diego the year before, was bitterly ironic, and it ended, "I should think we would take the theatre seriously. I should think we would take life seriously." But Broadway refused to the bitter end to take Lynn Riggs seriously.…
Dark Encounter, published but never produced, showed Riggs's concern about world problems. Taking place in an isolated house on Cape Cod on D-Day, the play is the story of a young woman (Gail) and a stranger (Karl) who suddenly appears. Riggs creates powerful suspense because we think that Karl may be a German saboteur, but we discover that he has applied for American citizenship and is distraught because his brother is fighting in the Nazi army. Coast Guardsmen and Gail's crippled Army-veteran fiance try to kill Karl, but another man is killed by mistake. Karl is a victim of circumstantial evidence, but a Portuguese girl witness switches to the truth at the last moment. Although we have a happy love ending between Gail and Karl, the play is a strong outcry against racial and national prejudices, and hatreds of all kinds. Karl says, "Everything fought for has been lost.…
God! Look at the dissension, the bigotry and mistrust! Look at youth—the youth that is to be the future of the race … making their guttural animal sounds instead of lucid speech. The beast walks over the earth! The beast…man…!" Riggs, with a strong sense of human responsibility, was part of the outcry being made by Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, and the young Tennessee Williams, as they all wrote with fear that the brutes would conquer the sensitive. By placing his play on the day of the most pivotal battle of World War II, Riggs gained thematic impact.…
Perhaps [Riggs's] work is best summed up by John Gassner, in his Best American Plays:
Lynn Riggs was one of the most gifted writers ever to write for the American stage, to which he brought a vivid memory, a compassionate spirit, and a poet's soul. It was impossible for him to cut his cloth to the requirements of show business, and I cannot recall anything he ever wrote … to which it was possible to attribute anything less than total integrity of observation and imagination … with his lively yet fine regional feeling, he also helped to give the American theatre some status for a while as a national institution rooted in the land.
In his reply to the citation given him by the University of Oklahoma, Riggs had some interesting things to say about himself:
Actually, I have done little in life except try to discover who I am and what my relation to the world I know consists of.
In the world itself I have never really felt at home. How can anyone feel at home in a world of unparalleled stupidity and cruelty, a world aching with hunger and despair? Can one be at peace with the economic and social and political organization of a world that makes man fear living, hate his neighbor, revile the sources of his being, and boast of his allegiance to violence and destruction? I do not think so.
And turning from the consideration of the outer world in dismay, I look at myself. And what do I find there? Weakness. Lack of discipline. Feeble attempts at understanding. Ignorance. Vanity. Waywardness and conceit.
I find, however, five working senses. And by great good luck I am able to see that these are tools that can perhaps be made to work for good instead of evil, that if I can refine them enough—these five senses—if I can use them enough truthfully, they may relate things to me that will give me strength and enough hope to go on when I find myself and the world impossible. Perhaps—if I am lucky, if I make declarations strong enough through work or through living—other people, too, may find the way less hard.
This quiet, unpretentious man who had only four plays produced on Broadway was nevertheless the greatest playwright to come out of the Southwest. Had there been vigorous regional professional theatre in his lifetime, his fame would have been assured, for he wrote with sensitivity and charm about the passions and foibles of the people he knew in the old Indian Territory.
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