Haunted by home

Playwright Lynn Riggs and the roots of ‘Oklahoma!’

In 1928, Lynn Riggs, a slender young man with wire-rimmed glasses, sat in a café in the French Riviera writing a play he thought he’d call “Shivaree”—a folk custom of harassing young couples on their wedding night. He’d recently left his home in Claremore, Oklahoma, first settling in an artists’ colony in Santa Fe after suffering an apparent nervous breakdown, then traveling to France as the first Oklahoman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship.

“People are always asking me about Oklahoma,” Riggs wrote in a letter earlier that year. “[But] the range of life there is not to be indicated, much less its meaning laid bare, by a few people in a few plays…. The people who settled Oklahoma were a suspect fraternity, as fearful of being recognized by others as they were by themselves … Men disdainful of the settled, the admired, the regular ways of life.

“These people,” he continued, “have been not quite known—a shifting fringe of dark around the camp-fire … I happened to be born myself just outside the rush of light. And I know how it feels, and, I think, how those others felt.”

Riggs was a poet, and a Cherokee Indian, and gay. His biographer Phyllis Braunlich called him “haunted by home.” And his most lasting contribution to American letters is a loving, lyrical, and complex six-scene reminiscence of the people with whom he could not live.

That play, ultimately titled “Green Grow the Lilacs,” was an effort to explore, Riggs wrote, “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.” 

That tenderness striated with darkness would become the chief note of the play, which premiered in 1931. Set “in Indian Territory in 1900,” it let the people Riggs grew up with speak for themselves. It was a time, he wrote, “when people were easier, warmer, happier in the environment they had created … And in spite of ignorances and darknesses, there was a cool wisdom … Even the speech of the people, backwoods though it was, was rich, flavorous, lustrous, and wise.” 

The vernacular language of the cowboy Curly, his girl Laurey, her Aunt Eller, and Riggs’ entire cast of characters (many drawn from real Claremore life, even the Syrian peddler) is the gold of “Green Grow the Lilacs,” as lyricist Oscar Hammerstein and composer Richard Rodgers recognized when they met to turn the play into the Broadway musical, “Oklahoma!” It was post-Depression, World War II America, and the fresh breeze of the frontier seemed just the thing for people hungry for reminders of who they’d once been and who they might be again. 

“Oklahoma!,” complete with its eponymous show-stopping song, opened in 1943 and, in celebration of 110 years of Oklahoma statehood, Theatre Tulsa presents the musical August 12-September 4 at the Tulsa PAC. 

When you see it, give a nod to Mr. Riggs—almost all of the dialogue is taken directly from his play, which Hammerstein said he thought couldn’t be improved upon. Even the opening song, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” comes from the play’s elegiac first stage direction:

It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of 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 of imagination focusing to keep alive a loveliness that may pass away. 

But loveliness coexists with loneliness in “Lilacs” to an even greater degree than it would in “Oklahoma!” It’s not just the malevolent Jeeter Fry (renamed Jud in the musical) who stands for the shadow in “Green Grow the Lilacs.” Laurey is an orphan besieged by anxiety; the play’s “shivaree” nearly shatters her. Curly himself sings endlessly about loneliness. He says to Aunt Eller, “Nobody cain’t sing good ‘ceptin’ when he’s lonesome.” (The play is strung through with sad folk songs, none of which Rodgers and Hammerstein used, but which were sung by real cowboys during the play’s run in New York.) 

There’s real question about whether those in Indian Territory will submit to the “furriners” (i.e., the United States), and also whether Curly will be exonerated after giving himself up in the aftermath of Jeeter’s accidental death. There’s always a threat of violence hanging over the promise of marriage.

Ultimately, in the world of “Lilacs,” what’s different must be excised (Jeeter) or converted (the peddler) or gradually put away (the natives) in pursuit of stability and maturity. Such is “civilization,” and “Oklahoma!” would draw those lines even more broadly. But Riggs, born homeless in his own home state, was less concerned with a happy ending than Rodgers and Hammerstein would be. He was true to the hauntedness of this place, the foolhardiness, the eager enthusiasm—both the darkness and the joy.

“Oklahoma!”
John H. Williams Theatre, Tulsa PAC
Aug. 12-13, 25 at 8 p.m.; Aug. 13-14, 27-28 at 2 p.m.; Sept. 1, 3 at 8 p.m.; Sept. 4 at 2 p.m. 

For more from Alicia, read her article on Summer Heat Dance Festival.