| re: Fascinating Discussion of Oklahoma vs Green Grow the Lilacs | |
| Posted by: reed23 04:55 am EDT 10/11/24 | |
| In reply to: Fascinating Discussion of Oklahoma vs Green Grow the Lilacs - WWriter 06:58 pm EDT 10/10/24 | |
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| Thanks for bringing the article to my attention. While it's interesting, like many agenda-hawking pieces, it's also packed full of misrepresentation and misinformation – starting with the characterization of Lynn Riggs as "Cherokee playwright." He was 1/16 Cherokee (the minimum to be considered Cherokee, among many complicated formulas of the day.) While his mother secured him the Cherokee allotment from the US Government, and he certainly wrote occasionally about his Cherokee ancestry and the population of Claremore, he traveled in highly urbane circles and locations, and wrote "Green Grow The Lilacs" in a Parisian café and a French village, after receiving a Guggenheim grant. (Ironically the Cherokee land allotments were designed to break down further the Native American tribal systems into private property and allowed more white settlement.) "Green Grow The Lilacs" was considered one of Riggs' sunnier plays, and many of its characters were based on his childhood memories of his own family. It is most certainly in no way an "Indian play," as the article's heavy-breathing author characterizes it (with surprising politically-incorrect language, given her self-righteousness.) I've always considered his play "The Cherokee Night" (which he wrote the year after "Lilacs") to be his darkest depiction of the forced decay of the Cherokee nation, and I wish those who want to bloody up "Oklahoma!" would address their energies to this more appropriate play instead. The author of the article misquotes and suspends context for elements of Rigg's play for a number of her hip sexual-politics-of-today assertions. She states: "Unwelcome statehood looms over Indian Territory in Riggs’ play, as the final stage of a relentless and brutal colonization of the West." The play is far more light-hearted than this fire-and-brimstone description, and she quotes Aunt Eller's lines about "furriners" without the comic context in which she's trying (successfully) to get the local crowd who have come to take Curly back to jail to desist and let him have his (wink-wink) wedding night with Laurey. In the course of the final scene, Riggs has Curly deliver the following in his what-have-you-learned-Dorothy speech to Laurey: “Oh, I got to learn to be a farmer, I see that! Quit a-thinkin’ about dehornin’ and brandin’ and th-owin’ the rope, and start in to git my hands blistered a new way! Oh, things is changin’ right and left! Buy up mowin’ machines, cut down the prairies! Shoe yer horses, drag them plows under the sod! They gonna make a state outa this, they gonna put it in the Union! Country a-changin’, got to change with it! Bring up a pair of boys, new stock, to keep up ‘th the way things is goin’ in this here crazy country! Life jist startin’ in for me now. Work to do! Now I got you to he’p me – I’ll ‘mount to sump’n yit!" It's not hard to see where Hammerstein got the inspiration for the title song, once it was added to the show in New Haven and the original title "Away We Go!" was changed to "Oklahoma!" It was hardly imposed on Riggs' play; it was suggested explicitly by it. The article's author also states, regarding the charivari: "Laurey has accepted her annexation into the role of wife and mother. She will forget what she has experienced at the hands of the town’s citizens." This is the exact opposite of what Eller says will happen with Laurey in their exchange, and the exact opposite of what Laurey then says to Curly upon his jail escape. This willful misrepresentation of Laurey's trajectory (part of the whole point of the play), to reiterate the currently fashionable men-are-pigs-and-women-are-victims neo-feminist exaggeration, hardly earns the article credibility or respect. I think it can be valuable to look at how the play was perceived in its time – only 12 years before Rodgers and Hammerstein musicalized it: “To see it and hear it in the pungent acting of Franchot Tone and Helen Westley and against the fragrant cornfield sets of Raymond Sovey is to share the high spirits of the writing. Here are characters so gloriously alive that, by contrast, the high comedians of ‘Private Lives’ seem merely to be suffering from studio vapors… It is heavily freighted with grand material – a series of stirring cowboy ballads, a stamping, swinging frontier carnival on Old Man Peck’s rear porch, a brutal charivari to celebrate Curly’s nuptials and a warm, humorous spirit of neighborliness… Every one in ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ has so much animal good-will that he feels like ‘hollerin’ and shoutin’ – and most of them do.” – J. Brooks Atkinson, NY Times Atkinson's "stirring cowboy ballads" phrase refers to the set of songs that were interspersed in the original play – which was thus almost "a musical" already in its original production. One of the songs included was the mid 19th-century popular folk song "Green Grow The Lilacs." (Apocryphally the song gave rise to the slang "gringo," supposedly a mis-hearing during the Mexican-American war.) The charivari ("shivaree") in the play, the single event that got the article's author's back up at the exclusion of most everything else in the rich tapestry of the play (and musical), is well-discussed by Aunt Eller and Laurey in the final scene play – as is the death of Laurey's parents (the father being Aunt Eller's brother) – and Aunt Eller's description of her husband's death by gunshot – Hammerstein did not include all the deaths and causes for despair in his final scene between Eller and Laurey, but any actress worth her salt playing Aunt Eller would imagine and convey what her speech about "being hearty" is about. Full disclosure: My grandmother's cousin, Barrett Clark, was a close friend of Lynn Riggs (and Eugene O'Neill), and I have photographs of the handsome and dapper Riggs with Clark; Brooks Atkinson mentioned Clark in the Times review. Barrett Clark was also the founder and editor of the Dramatists' Play Service, which he designed to make play scripts available both to the general public, and especially to the countless producing companies nationwide to further the interests of playwrights and their audiences. |
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