SOURCE: "The Oklahoma Plays of R. Lynn Riggs," in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 390-94.

In the following essay, Braunlich provides an overview of Riggs's dramatic works.

Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) is without doubt the greatest playwright from Oklahoma to write plays about Oklahoma. To be specific, he dramatized life in Indian Territory just before and after statehood, which came in 1907. He is best known for his successful 1931 play Green Grow the Lilacs, produced on Broadway by the Theatre Guild. The same group produced the play in a musical version by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein in 1943, titled Oklahoma! The phenomenal success of this play, which is still performed internationally, would alone be sufficient to establish Lynn Riggs's reputation as an outstanding Oklahoma writer. However, he also wrote twenty other full-length plays, twelve of which were published and eight produced though unpublished. He also published one-act...