World–Bank Drama

Scene from apraduction ifGreen Grow the Lilacs, :;:6Janua!Jl 1931, CUlldTheatre. By permission of the Museum of the City of New York. World-Bank Drama JOSEPH ROACH Green grow the lilacs, all sparkling with dew, I'm lonely, my darling, since partingvnth you, And by our next meeting I hope to prove true To change the green lilacs to the red, white, and blue. This lyric comes froITt the 1931 Theatre Guild production of Green Grow the Lilacs, Lynn Riggs's "folk play" of conventional romance and dark ritual set in Indian Territory before it became a state at the closing of the American frontier a century ago. The title song was one of a dozen ballads gathered locally and transcribed by the playwright, who was a gifted singer himself , for production on Broadway and on national tour. Of his ambitions for the play, Riggs modestly wrote: It must be fairly obvious from reading or seeing the play that it might have been subtitled 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.I ESQ I v. 50 11ST-3RD QUARTERS I2004 157 Oklahoma' 'd B . Win ow card d ' y permission of the ,eslgnedfor the ori 'n Museum of the (it 'glf alproduction (1943) yo New York. . WORLD-BANK DRAMA Riggs succeeded far beyond expectation, but not ultiInately in the venue he intended. Green Grow the Lilacs is better known today (though still perhaps not as well known as it should be) as the play adapted by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham:merstein II as Oklahoma! the revolutionaryAInerican musical comedy, which opened in I943. The plot, the characters, and much of the dialogue from the play reappear unchanged in the musical, and even the new tunes and lyrics follow Riggs's intentions by evoking a distinctive rnood, one that presaged, in its nostalgia and unnervingly self-satisfied mystifications, the highly effective theme from Ronald Reagan's I984 reelection campaign: "It's Morning Again in AInerica." Riggs's opening stage direction for Green Grow the Lilacs sets the time and place in which the action will unfold: "It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of the earth-men, cattle in a meadow, blades of the young corn, streams-makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation that is partly true and partly a trick ofimagination focussing to keep alive a loveliness that may pass away." Giving material form to the verbal cognates voice, invocation, evocation , and vocation, the playwright calls for the first entrance to be made by a singing cowboy: "And, like the voice ofthe morning ' a rich male voice outside somewhere begins to sing" (3). So deeply has Rodgers and Hammerstein's bucolic "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'" insinuated itself into popular memory that in retrospect Riggs's own introductory song, meant to establish Curly McLain's character, sounds like a bumptious parody: Ta whoop ti aye ay, git along, you little dogies! Way out in "Vyoming shall be your bright homeA -whooping and a-yelling and a-driving those dogies, And a-riding those bronchos that are none of my own. (4,) 159 JOSEPH ROACH The original folk tune does directly assert, in ways its successor does not, the fact that cowb?) was a one-word job description for the geographically dispossessed. This is "an old song" indeed, at least by the standards of American popular culture, one of Inany derived froIn the socalled COInInon dOInain, that folkloric liInbo of unclaiIned intellectual property where Riggs found it, but by no Ineans where Rodgers and HaInInerstein left it. Even in its transforInation beyond recognition into a show tune, however , the preexisting, authorless ballad, by the very fact of its priority and anonYInity, adds authenticity and hence value to the cOInInercial work. Like...