The Cherokee Night and Other Plays (review)

The University of Oklahoma Press's republication of three of Lynn Riggs's plays starts off strongly with an introduction by Jace Weaver, a Cherokee critic who has written about Lynn Riggs in his seminal 1997 work of Native American literary history That the People Might Live: Native American Literature and Native American Community. Weaver describes the growing interest in Lynn Riggs in the 1990s among American Indian scholars and an expanding view of those works of Riggs that critics might consider as Indian-themed. Weaver also points out the centrality of music in Lynn Riggs's plays and his life. Riggs was a guitar player and singer who collected and scrutinized the folk songs of his Oklahoma upbringing. Green Grow the Lilacs was a musical with sung lyrics as a central feature before Rodgers and Hammerstein ever turned it into the smash Broadway hit Oklahoma! Riggs uses song to amplify the situations in his plays, a factor the critics have not analyzed. Weaver also acknowledges the beginning collaborations in the late 1930s between Riggs and composer Aaron Copland where they were beginning to influence each other's work, opportunities that, unfortunately, were cut short.

In addition to these important musical cornerstones for Riggs's plays, another Weaver insight is the disturbing ethnic cleansing that occurs in the transition of the play Green Grow the Lilacs to the musical Oklahoma! where, in the latter case, native people and all other non-white ethnicities are completely erased. However briefly, perhaps even problematically, the topic is alluded to in Green Grow the Lilacs, the play, nonetheless, insists on Cherokee jurisdiction. Aunt Eller tells the mob trying to haul Curly back to jail in the concluding scene,

Now I see you're jist a gang of fools. Trying to take a bridegroom away from his bride! Why, the way you're sidin' with the federal marshal, you'd think us people out here lived in the United States! Why, we're territory folks—we ort to hang together. I don't mean hang—I mean stick. Whut's the United States? It's jist a furrin country to me. And you supportin' it! Jist dirty ole furriners, ever last one of you!

(103)

Weaver also makes an interesting comparative note in relation to Riggs. Riggs is often viewed as a second-rate playwright in relation to Williams, O'Neill, Miller, and Odets and leading figures in modernism. If, however, one scrutinizes Riggs according to how well he depicts his home country, he is much more effective at representing Oklahomans than Steinbeck (arguably the latter author might achieve a greater poetic truth than accuracy). It strikes me that in terms of speech Riggs is unsurpassed at capturing Oklahomans although the sensationalism in his plays often distracts him from his characters' interiority. Weaver concludes his introduction by hoping that the anthology will be a beginning, rather than an ending for continued republication of Riggs's work.

Apart from Weaver's deft handling of the anthology's opening, the book suffers. If it is a beginning it is a truly feeble one, at least in terms of the contextual materials that introduce the plays. Unfortunately, Leo Cundiff, the nephew of Lynn Riggs who has the rights for some of Riggs's plays, according to a July 28, 2004, article in the Oklahoma Gazette for which Cundiff was interviewed, took the anthology hostage by threatening the University of Oklahoma Press (UOP) that he would withhold permission for the publication of Riggs's work if anything was said in the book about Riggs's gay identity (40).

Consequently, the word "gay" appears nowhere in the volume nor does any reference whatsoever to any aspect of Riggs's sexuality, a factor, it must be said, that is essential to any mature understanding of Riggs's plays and his life. The contextual information that prefaces each play is misleading due to the erasure of such important facts. Because I think it is ridiculous that a university press can be...