Lynn Riggs’s Comedies

Abstract

Critics and audiences recognized Cherokee Nation playwright Lynn Riggs (1899‒1954) in his time for his comedies. His most succesful Broadway play, the comedy Russet Mantle, triumphed at Theatre Masque in 1936 before playing in venues around the country. Similarly to Indigenous writers such as Alexander Posey (Creek Nation; 1873‒1908) and Will Rogers (Cherokee Nation; 1879‒1935), Riggs drew heavily in his comedies on the life, regional language, and sense of humor of the people of Indian Territory. He also adapted venerable comic traditions. We build on our own recent publications and on the foundational scholarly works on Riggs by Craig Womack, Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), and Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation) that focus on the dramatist’s more violent and bleaker Indigenous-specific plays, by proposing a second, parallel artistic trajectory for Riggs that moves to, through, and past Russet Mantle, his most conventional comedy. By expanding the current academic view of the first professional Indigenous dramatist’s career, we begin to account for the full range of his artistic labor and determined attempt to find a voice, including a comedic one, that appealed to a broad audience; to situate him more precisely in Native American and US literary histories; and to respond to Vine Deloria Jr’s (Yankton Dakota) lament “that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by the professed experts in Indian Affairs” (146) by enshrining in the critical record Riggs’s sense of humor.