Full Description
Lynn Riggs: The Indigenous Plays bundles critically edited texts of three thematically allied plays with an extensive primary, secondary, and textual apparatus. The Cherokee Night (1932), comprising seven asynchronous scenes set between 1895 and 1931, is Riggs's most experimental play. Its Cherokee characters inhabit a history of dispossession and violence, including the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. Their daily survival constitutes the apex of resistance. Not so for the Indigenes of The Year of Pilar (1938), the most radical American Indian text prior to the Native American renaissance that began in the late 1960s. Here, Yucatecan Mayans take a government program of land reform as an opportunity to reclaim their homeland and punish settler-colonialists for centuries of enslavement, torture, and sexual violence. Riggs returns to Indian Territory in The Cream in the Well (1941), set on the eve of Oklahoma statehood. The Cherokee Sawters family responds to the onset of statehood by lamenting lost opportunities and fretting about an uncertain future.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface by Daniel Heath Justice
Introduction
Lynn Riggs: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Texts The Cherokee Night
The Year of Pilar
The Cream in the Well
Appendix A: Lynn Riggs on the Performing Arts
1. 'When People Say 'Folk Drama,'' Carolina Playbook (June 1931)
2. 'High, Wide, and Handsome' (review of Singing Cowboy), The Nation (16 December 1931)
3. 'Poetry-And Poetry in the Theatre' (16 November 1932)
4. Letter to Paul Green ('Vine Theatre Letter') (5 March 1939)
5. 'Some Notes on the Theatre' (19 February 1940)
6. 'A Credo for the Tributary Theatre' (1940), Theatre Arts (February 1941)
7. 'What the Theatre Can Mean to All of Us' (27 March 1940)
8. 'We Speak for Ourselves: A Dance Poem,' Theatre Arts (December 1943)
9. 'A Note on 'We Speak for Ourselves,'' Dance Observer (November 1943)
Appendix B: Productions of Plays by Lynn Riggs
Textual Apparatus
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgements
Index
