Lynn Riggs deserves an apology.

Born at the end of a scaldingly hot August in 1899, Riggs ought to be remembered as one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century. As versed in classical poetic forms as he was in regional slang, his grasp of language and the specifics it bestows upon a character illuminated the humanity of the Great Plains region with as much clarity as Tennessee Williams treated the South, with far less of the romanticization. His exploration of dramatic realism rivaled Eugene O'Neill, and his subversive humor often outpaced even the most lauded of the Algonquin set. 

And yet, he is often most remembered as a footnote in American theatre history: the playwright who inspired Oklahoma!. It isn't a incorrect aspect of his legacy; in a way, Riggs is the great-grandfather to the modern American musical. Oklahoma!, considered to be one of the most important turning points in American theatre history, pulled directly from Riggs’ Green Grow The Lilacs, with his sensibility as a playwright serving as the blueprint for what is, potentially, the most influential musical of all time. That cannot, however, be the entirety of his recognized legacy.

“So many of Lynn Riggs' plays have been ignored by contemporary audiences because, to them, the whole story of Lynn Riggs has become, ‘He wrote the play that became the basis of a great American musical.'" Dramaturg Amy Stoller shakes her head, sighing. "He is such a fascinating playwright, and his work deserves to stand on its own as well”

At Mint Theater Company, one of New York’s premier Off-Broadway companies, which reexamines the artistic canon to discover looked-over pieces of theatre history, Riggs is finally getting his due. A cracking team has been assembled to revive (or rather, resurrect) Riggs' play Sump'n Like Wings. It's now running through November 2.

Written in 1925, the work has been all but forgotten in the shadow of Green Grow the Lilacs and Oklahoma!. Predating Green Grow The Lilacs by half a decade, the play lingered in Riggs back catalogue until after Lilacs' success, when it was briefly produced and published before again going underground. In Riggs' lifetime, three different New York producers took out options on Sump'n Like Wings, but those options all lapsed without a production. The Mint's production marks the show's New York debut, 99 years after Riggs first put pen to paper.

Like Lilacs, Sump'n Like Wings takes place in Riggs' native Oklahoma. It follows a young girl's struggles to maintain her personal pride in the shadow of her position in society. Surface-level similarities between Oklahoma's restless heroine Laurie Williams and Willie Baker are easily drawn. But Amy Stoller and Jesse Marchese, the Mint’s dramaturgy team, pushed the production to dig far, far deeper to truly illuminate every contextual corner of the play—to understand how they can best serve the piece considering there have been no major productions in over a century and there's no specific record from Riggs on what he intended when writing the play.

“Amy does the micro and I’m the macro,” Marchese states from his home in San Diego, California, where he serves as the director of development and resident dramaturg at Diversionary Theater—when he is not working as the dramaturgical advisor to the Mint. “That means she focuses on the language of this play, and I'm thinking about this play in the larger breadth of Lynn Riggs' life and work. I am in charge of asking, ‘Why this play now? Why does this play matter? Why does Lynn Riggs matter?’ The story of Lynn Riggs, the story of the play, and why they matter to the audience is what I help the Mint frame.”

While many have a limited view of what American theatre history looks like (and whose work goes down in those history books), the reality is far more varied and diverse. An Indigenous gay man growing up on a reservation in what was then known as Oklahoma territory, Riggs drew directly from his own lived experience to create his work, which in turn embedded the Indigenous gay experience into the tapestry of the American theatre.

“What's fascinating about Lynn is he brought Oklahoma and the American Southwest to New York stages," explains Marchese. "This is a time where you're probably seeing a lot of drawing room plays, a lot of urbane theatre. He was born in 1899, he left Oklahoma when he finished high school, came back to do college, and then left again. Like a lot of queer men, he hightailed it out of that rural town. It was Indian territory when he was born, which means it was the place where the United States forcibly moved all these tribes to live. It is a place that was founded on violence, in particular sexual violence. And Lynn was a product of that violence, he lived in the era of the Dawes Act, where the American government was taking control away from the tribes and trying to assimilate them into a sort of white settler, individualist life. And his work is wrestling with that. He's wrestling with being Cherokee, but maybe not Cherokee enough, and also being part of this promise of America and being part settler. He's wrestling with being a gay man in Oklahoma, where there was a machismo that he did not identify with from the oil rig workers and ranchers and cowboys. And he's a sensitive writer, he knows how complex identity is. He knows how identity both helps to chart our path, but can also fail us."

As Marchese emphasizes: "When I read his plays, I see a lesson in American history.”

Sump'n Like Wings is set in Oklahoma between spring 1913 and summer 1916, right at the center of Riggs' own adolescence. A coming-of-age story, the play charts the growth of Willie Baker, a fiery, impulsive young woman who can’t wait to burst out of the confines of the home she lives in. The specifics of Willie’s life, in particular what the world calling to her was like, are critical to understanding the true breadth of her plight and the force of her desire to be free.

“Oklahoma had barely been a state for five years,” Marchese explains. “It was a place founded by unthinkable violence, but it was also a world of promise, because you had settlers there who wanted to start a new life, you had Black people who were freed slaves who could kind of escape America's racist policies in this more unregulated place, and you had these Native American folks who has some sliver of self determination in this place—as their sovereignty was being chipped away at by American policies. Oklahoma was this boiling pot of both America's failures and promises. And this play is about the limits of freedom, particularly for women at this time.”

As a part of their research process, Stoller and Marchese traveled to Oklahoma, pouring over Riggs’ drafts of the play at the University of Tulsa and personal scrapbooks, in order to find any guidance or notes of intention Riggs had scrawled in the margins. They also visited the Claremore Museum of History—which has the permanent exhibit of Lynn Rigg’s personal items, including photos, his typewriter, and the stage-set diorama he used to work out the physical action of his plays. Throughout the entire trip, it struck them how much Claremore has changed since Riggs escaped it in the early 20th century.

"This town that Lynn ran away from now has a Lynn Riggs Boulevard," Marchese details, shaking his head. It isn't just Claremore that has accepted their literary son; in recent years, the Riggs estate itself has ceased its attempts to whitewash Riggs life. "There is a beautiful portrait by Lynn's long-term partner, Ramon Naya, who was a Mexican American painter and playwright, and it's a nude self portrait. That was stored away by the estate for a long time, and they actually had painted over the genitals because they were ashamed."

Shame no longer factors in. "The museum proudly displays it, fully restored, because they acknowledge that this part of who he was matters. The people of Oklahoma have had quite a reckoning, between the Tulsa Race Riots and the treatment of the Native Americans, but they aren’t shying away from it anymore. And right in the center of town is a mural of Lynn Riggs in front of a beautiful rainbow. They're very proud of his legacy as a queer writer from the early 20th century. And that may not be what your readers think of when they think of Oklahoma, but just like Riggs was saying in 1925, these places are more complex than you possibly know.”

That complexity is on full display in Riggs' body of work, which draws upon both his experiences and the array of individuals he grew up observing.

“We know for a fact that many of Lynn Riggs’s characters were based, in part, on people he knew,” Stoller shares. “Most seem to be people he knew in his childhood, family members, people who were in the communities where he grew up. His play is not autobiographical, but these people sparked his imagination. And yeah, we're not doing a documentary, we're doing storytelling, but it's based in a lot of historical reality.”

That historical reality is the grounding in the work that Stoller and Marchese do, providing an ocean of context within which the rest of the show's team can immerse themselves. They do caution against getting too bogged down in historical accuracy, however.

"Some guy in the cast came to me and said, 'Did men cross their legs then?'" Stoller laughs. "And look, I can find old newspaper cartoons of upper class gentlemen crossing their legs, to prove that people in 1911 did these things. But you don't really need to see the picture to know that if you can cross your legs in those trousers, you can cross your legs. They're still human beings."

As individuals whose job can be distilled down to being “professionally curious,” both Stoller and Marchese revel in the sheer number of questions a play can inspire when read closely.

“It doesn't matter how many times I've read the play to myself, until I hear the play out loud, I haven’t really felt it,” Stoller states. “I’ve read this play 10, 15 times, I’ve lost track, just combing through the play, and every time I see our cast, I discover three very specific things that I’ve missed. I like to think of myself as detail oriented, but there will always be things that go over my head until somebody else brings it into the room. That’s the collaboration.”

She pauses for a moment, smiling at Marchese before sitting back in her seat. “My day is wasted if I haven't learned something new, and I'm the luckiest person in the world, because I get to learn new things for a living.”

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Photos: Sump'n Like Wings Off-Broadway

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