America's "folk-drama" of the 1920's and 1930's appears a last stand of nineteenth-century regionalism…. [It] was a brief movement which capitalized on the quaintness and charm, the eccentricity and even grotesqueness, of character, dialect, and setting. There was some necessary superficiality in a tradition that relied too much on entertaining a sophisticated cosmopolitan audience with a parade of characters—or caricatures—from a province. Another rather superficial motive shows in this drama when it was locally produced: the region's own pride in its individuality. But the folk drama did often strive toward the expression of universal human problems and lasting values.

In both aspiration and achievement, the outstanding playwright produced by this movement in the United States was Paul Green…. Green knew intuitively the struggles of an unsophisticated people against the forces of both nature and society. These were the "folk" in whom Green found universal human values laid bare. When he began writing plays in the 1920's, he was immediately attracted to the so-called "folk" drama of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, to such plays as Riders to the Sea and Playboy of the Western World. In his own region Green saw a native character parallel to that dramatized by Synge, and his natural impulse was, like Synge's, poetic: he converted folk idiom to poetry and drew the regional character in terms of eternal conflicts. (pp. 91-2)

The regional folk beliefs and customs … are part and parcel of the body of materials from which Green draws both incident and idea. Through these ideas and practices he expresses the personality of the folk who are at once individualized in their peculiarities and universalized in that those peculiarities express fundamental purposes and forces in human nature. He is striving to express the uniqueness of the folk but, paradoxically, the spiritual One that resides in the separate instances of the Many.

Whereas Green's exploration in folk beliefs and customs, even when he turned to written sources, provided him with a knowledge of the people themselves, his use of folktale and legend extended into another dimension, imaginative literature, characters and plots created by the folk. (pp. 94-5)

[Qualities] of folk literature inhere to a sometimes greater, sometimes lesser, degree in Green's entire body of plays. If the influence of folk literature bent Green toward stylization, formalization, and a heightened and romantic view, the folk themselves, being men in a natural state, inclined him toward a naturalistic treatment of his subjects. On the one hand, there exists a romanticizing, an ennoblement of humanity not unlike the vision by which the primitive sayer or seer transmutes the everyday into the miraculous, transfigures man through myth. On the other hand lies the realistic or naturalistic view of the folk, one which though sympathetic is inclined to see them as no better than they actually are. If his plays contain these seemingly contradictory views of the folk, they are part and parcel of the sources from which he drew.

Folk characters created in the plays are no homogeneous lot, for they grow out of this dualistic view. One character may appear to be drawn from Green's direct knowledge of people; another may retain strong suggestions of his literary prototype; and still another may show close kinship to a type in folklore. A figure who retains the earthy character of the folk may in his similarity to some literary mold suggest that he is drawn from types of both life and literature. (p. 97)

Green's quest for a folk hero … draws from folk and literary tradition, moving ever toward the vision of some prototypal hero. In so far as one is concerned with a literary man's use of heroic types to elevate his characters, there is little to be gained by making scholarly distinctions between myth, saga, and folk tale, or between mythical, legendary, and historical heroes…. Whether a writer like Green implies that one of his characters is like Christ, Oedipus, King Arthur, or Paul Bunyan, his endeavor is to suggest the uncommon or even superhuman nature of that character, repeating once more the romantic idealization by which men in all ages have created heroes. Green himself suggests that, to counteract the rationalism and sterility, the categorizing and fact-finding of modern education, which hinder an appreciation of the truth and life to be found in literature, one should discover the power and beauty of literature itself, turning to the heroes of life for inspiration: Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, John Henry, Mike Fink, Roy Bean, Casey Jones, Johnny Appleseed, Br'er Rabbit, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. (As this partial list shows, Green would have no objection to fusing mythical, legendary, and historical heroes under one rubric: heroes of life.)

Although Green's short plays and tales seem to have offered him little room for developing a true folk hero, his interest in creating the type can be seen in the short works. (pp. 99-100)

[However, it is] in the long plays that Green most fully develops his folk heroes. Abe McCranie becomes noble in his compulsion to lift his people out of degradation, but the heroic figures of The Field God and Roll Sweet Chariot even more so than Abe have their heroic stature elevated to truly epic dimensions. It was in the symphonic outdoor plays that Green finally fulfilled his desire to dramatize the American hero, painting heroic portraits of such national figures as Jefferson and Washington.

Green's striding toward a timeless world of symbol, then, like his tireless search for new and more nearly perfect forms of drama, led him toward basal figures and patterns which underpin the plays. His search for a hero has been evidenced by his transmutation of the common man of his region into the precious metal of a folk hero. As this search led him in widening circles, one may with assurance follow him into the limits of folklore and literature from which he drew inspiration….

[Blue Thunder] provides a most interesting study of Green's use of legendary and folk materials in a highly unrealistic and experimental manner. The play seems as uprooted from reality as do some of the short poetic dramas of William Butler Yeats such as At the Hawk's Well or The Shadowy Waters. Like these plays, it seems constantly to allude to some mythical, or at least distant and shadowy, referent. The language is stylized, the action ritualized, and, as in some of Yeats' plays, the distinctions between man and god blurred. (p. 100)

Briefly, the play concerns Blue Thunder, "the man who married a snake," who on a realistic level is a Negro ladies' man caught in the act of deserting his three mistresses. The women sing, like conventional mourners, songs of lamentation for the loss of their man, waiting patiently, while he boasts and demonstrates his supernatural powers, for the loss of power which they are certain will descend upon him. Greedily attacking his body after his own supernatural weapons have turned and killed him, they are surprised by the appearance of a little black man, who is death come to take them. (p. 101)

An explanation of this play's action on an entirely realistic basis is, then, almost valueless. The women are not merely mistresses who take revenge on a lover for his attempt to desert them. Read in terms of mythic action, Blue Thunder must be seen as a travesty, for the ultimate purpose of ritual, the reinstatement of positive spiritual powers in a new king, the resurrection of a god or the rebirth of nature, is not fulfilled. Blue Thunder's mention of the cycle of nature emphasizes death as an end: "Farewell. I come in the spring and find you full in the flower, I leave you in the fall with the sap and bloom all gone."… He represents a perversion, a curtailment of the promise, of the dying god whose death, though lamented in the fall, promises the return of life in the spring.

In Blue Thunder, finally, folk, biblical, and mythic referents cast the entire action in an ironic light, for such allusions point to spiritual values which are subverted by the characters.

This review of Green's use of folk materials reveals a playwright bent on transforming them into poetic, symbolic drama. Rather than merely explicating the character and legend of his region, he is exploiting them. And this impulse to transcend the folk, to the degree that it informs Green's drama and fiction, makes Green's work viable and interesting today. (pp. 105-06)