Lynn Riggs: Forgotten Genius

LYNN RIGGS: FORGOTTEN GENIUS By Jason James Edward Michael, MFA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Pedagogy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014 Major Director: Noreen C. Barnes Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Theatre Lynn Riggs was an early to mid-20 th century Native American playwright who wrote twenty-four full length plays, his sole enduring success being Green Grow the Lilacs, the play upon which the musical Oklahoma! is based. For much of the early part of Riggs’s career, he was considered a uniquely pioneering and promising playwright, cited in competition with Eugene O’Neill as vying for the position of best playwright of their age. But while O’Neill has gone on to be considered America’s Greatest Playwright, the life and works of Lynn Riggs, save for his contribution to Rodgers and Hammerstein, have gone largely forgotten and unexamined. It is the purpose of my paper to 1) provide a biographical sketch of the man, 2) give an overview of several major themes that run through his work, and 3) provide some theory and analysis as to why the promise of this young and distinctly Native American voice was never adequately fulfilled in his lifetime. I will attempt to argue that a combination of circumstances including Riggs’s poor home life, his at times misogynistic and racist points of view, America’s inability to see Native Americans as other than caricatures and, quite simply, bad luck put much of Riggs’s writing on a fast track to failure and contemporary obscurity. CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHY “There is a winged lightness in the words that the poet puts in the mouths of his young people, an ecstasy born of the sheer joy of being alive.” –Barrett H. Clark from the forward of Big Lake, August 1927 “This script – you know it is twash.” – Marlene Dietrich from the foreword of The Cherokee Night Rollie Lynn Riggs was the author of twenty-four plays (twenty-two full length and two one-acts), several volumes of poetry, short stories, an unfinished novel, and multiple movie scripts. Yet today he is known best not for his own work, but for the contribution of source material from his Green Grow the Lilacs to the first Rodgers and Hammerstein musical smash collaboration: Oklahoma!, a musical that removed much of what Riggs would have considered his best effort: his folk songs, his multicultural characters, and the simplicity of his narrative, and replaced them with big Broadway showstoppers, stock characters and a “whites only” open range. What happened to the legacy of Lynn Riggs that he barely ranks a footnote in the annals of American Theatre history? How is it that this uniquely poetic Southwestern voice that many called fresh, promising, and the rival of Eugene O’Neill in the late 1920s went practically unnoticed when he died in 1954 from complications of stomach cancer? To answer this question I began by reading all plays of Riggs’s still either published or obtainable through loan or purchase. Five plays out of a total of thirteen published: Green Grow Grow the Lilacs, Big Lake, Hang Onto Love, Russet Mantle and The Cherokee Night, remain in print for purchase or licensing, though Green Grow the Lilacs is Riggs’s only play to receive regular contemporary performances. Another nine proved available through Amazon and inter-library loans. In total I was able to examine fourteen out of seventeen of Riggs’s published works, about sixty percent of his total dramatic canon, but better than eighty percent of his published material.