The Cherokee Night and Other Plays by Lynn Riggs (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 4 5 9 stones he critiques prove surprising. His treatment of recent Native American and Chicana/o writing is fresh and inspired. But, along with creative readings of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, John Sayles’s films, Mike Davis’s L.A., and William Kittredge’s Northwestern memoirs, Campbell’s responses to texts by Leslie Silko, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, and Gloria Anzaldúa round out a thankfully widening list of literary usual suspects. Nevertheless, Campbell also attends closely to works by Gerald Vizenor, Rubén Martinez, and Luis Alberto Urrea, all of whom have not yet received nearly as much critical attention as they deserve. Campbell’s equally deft treatment of literature, film, photography, cultural geography, and critical theory demonstrates that his scholarship thrives in the crossroads between disciplines. Like the New Westerners addressed in his text, he is a scholar who actively seeks out “routes” between perception and novel expression rather than one who sinks in “roots” to prop up foundational myths. His text will help others revisit and see anew familiar sites in western American studies. Much more than just a survey of well-trod terrain, The Cultures of theAmerican New West invites readers to explore rewarding detours and uncanny intersections of old and new. The Cherokee Night and Other Plays. By Lynn Riggs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. 343 pages, $69.95/$24.95. Reviewed by David Fenimore University of Nevada, Reno Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) is best known as the author of Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), which Oscar Hammerstein II adapted for Oklahoma, importing much of the play’s text verbatim into the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. In this and the two other plays reprinted here, the prolific Riggs—poet, screen­ writer, and the only workingNative American dramatist during the first halfof the twentieth century—forged out of his childhood landscape and memories a lyrical vision of a changing and conflicted mixed-race West. However, his depictions of a darker and more Freudian frontier society were all but over­ whelmed by changing theatrical fashions and the mass-produced superficiality of Western films, TV shows, and Broadway musicals. Like his friend Aaron Copland, with whom he narrowly missed collabo­ rating on a western opera, Riggs wrote tone poems that at their deepest evoke the moodiness and tragedy of the American landscape. He set the three plays collected here (The Cherokee Night, Green Grow the Lilacs, and Out ofDust) in tum-of-the-century Indian Territory, where he grew up as the son of a wealthy rancher and a one-eighth Cherokee mother. He ranged between his adopted homes of Santa Fe and New York City, spent time in France on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter on early Westerns and other genre films. 4 6 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 Following the conventions of Broadway and standing in contrast to the economic realities of today’s theater, many of Riggs’s plays call for large ensemble casts and elaborate sets. Almost epic in its scope, The Cherokee Night (1932) ambitiously specifies three dozen actors, a chorus, and a great geological escarpment as backdrop. The intense and sometimes melodramatic dialogue uses phonetic spellings and variant syntax to capture regional dialect, a prac­ tice that today can seem comically cliched and which even at the time was criticized by one reviewer as “oafish.” When Green Grow the Lilacs was revived in Westport a decade after its successful but limited first run, choreography by Gene Kelly nudged it even further from naturalism, closer to Hammerstein’s larger-than-life adaptation. Riggs is said to have been most disappointed that the authentic folk songs he wrote into the play were replaced by Richard Rodgers’s music. The other two plays reprinted here also make frequent use of traditional folk tunes to highlight a subtext or ritualize a dramatic moment. More than just music, they function as poetry that further heightens the play’s language. In the King...