SOURCE: "Riggs Worships Great Spirit," in The New York Times, June 21, 1932, p. 19.

As drama critic for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960, Atkinson was one of the most influential reviewers in America. In the following mixed review of The Cherokee Night, he praises the play's universal themes and Riggs's ability to express the desperation and confusion felt by his characters.

From Green Grow the Lilacs…Lynn Riggs has passed bravely on to The Cherokee Night.… Although it is a perplexing drama, which holds the conventional theatre forms in fine contempt, it has an exaltation of spirit that is honest, solid and moving, and this footloose department feels well repaid for the journey involved in seeing it.

For it is Mr. Riggs's thesis that the Cherokee blood plagues those who inherit it. In a phantasmagoria of scenes, badly related and bewildered in their time sequence, he shows the Cherokee...