Daniel Pollack-Pelzner explains that contemporary reinterpretations of the classic American musical Oklahoma! may be getting back to its root: it\u27s based on a play by a gay Cherokee man

Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel

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Linfield College DigitalCommons@Linfield Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship & Creative Works 11-19-2018 The Hidden History of 'Oklahoma!' Daniel Pollack-Pelzner Linfield College, dpollack@linfield.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs  Part of the American Studies Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Commons, Playwriting Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the Theatre History Commons DigitalCommons@Linfield Citation Pollack-Pelzner, Daniel, "The Hidden History of 'Oklahoma!'" (2018). Faculty Publications. Published Version. Submission 51. https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/englfac_pubs/51 This Published Version is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It is brought to you for free via open access, courtesy of DigitalCommons@Linfield, with permission from the rights-holder(s). 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The hidden history of ‘Oklahoma!’Contemporary reinterpretations of the classic American musical may be gettingback to its root: It's based on a play by a gay Cherokee man.November 19, 2018 // CULTURE, THEATER // Oregon ArtsWatchBy DANIEL POLLACK-PELZNERSeventy-five years ago, as Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new musical Oklahoma! was beginning itssellout run on Broadway, the Times ran an indignant letter from Eva Paul, of Provincetown. “It is ratheramusing to notice the insouciance and naïve bravado with which all the perpetrators of Oklahoma!eliminate all mention of Lynn Riggs,” she wrote. “After all, did he or did he not give them a plot towhich they more or less adhered and a galaxy of characters which none of them ever approached in theirother undertakings?”Original poster for“Oklahoma!” on Broadway,1943. Wikimedia CommonsHe did: a decade earlier, Riggs had enjoyed a brief Broadway success at the Theatre Guild with hisplay Green Grow the Lilacs, which evoked the cowboys and farmers of his childhood in Indian Territory,before Oklahoma became a state. Traditional folk songs and picturesque dialogue enlivened a courtshiptriangle: whether Laurey, a young homesteader, would go to a party with Curly, a cocky cowboy, orJeeter Fry, a rough farmhand. In 1942, the Guild’s producer, Theresa Helburn, saw a revival of GreenGrow the Lilacs and thought it could furnish the material for an American folk opera on the model ofPorgy and Bess, which the Guild had also staged. She engaged Richard Rodgers—his partnership withLarry Hart dissolving as Hart fell prey to alcoholism and depression—to compose the music and OscarHammerstein—longing for a hit after a series of flops with his Show Boat partner, Jerome Kern—toadapt Riggs’s play and write the lyrics.Hammerstein showed up at Rodgers’s country house one Friday evening with words for an openingnumber, “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning”; by Saturday morning, he recalled, Rodgers had written theloping, romantic tune: a throwback waltz for a cowboy headed for marriage in a territory at the dawn ofstatehood, confident that “everything’s going my way.” That mix of nostalgic optimism—recalling afrontier past that promised a bright, patriotic future—proved irresistible to American audiences in themiddle of World War Two, and when Oklahoma! opened in 1943, it broke every box office record, evenpacking in troops for special matinees. An estimated 600 revivals now take place around the world everyyear—including ones recently running in New York and Oregon that offered contrasting visions of themusical’s contested history.Cherokee playwright LynnRiggs (1899 – 1954), the onlyAmerican Indian dramatistwriting for Broadway in the firsthalf of the 20th century.Smithsonian Institution /Courtesy U.S. Naval AcademyHammerstein responded to Eva Paul’s charge of eliminating Riggs with his own letter to the Times, a tadcheeky and defensive: “As a perpetrator of Oklahoma! I deny this.” He acknowledged keeping manylines from Riggs’s script and trying to preserve the values of Green Grow the Lilacs—“lusty melodrama,authentic folk characters and a sensitive lyric quality”—in the musical. (Riggs’s opening stage direction,for instance, evoking a “radiant summer morning” with cattle and corn in a meadow “giving off a visiblegolden emanation” became Hammerstein’s lyric for “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning”: “There’s a brightgolden haze on the meadow.”) He concluded: “Lynn Riggs and ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ are the verysoul of Oklahoma! Okay, Miss Paul?”In a sense, though, Paul wasn’t wrong to suggest that the musical’s perpetrators had eliminated theplay’s author—even as he enjoyed a playbill credit and box office royalties. Riggs was a gay Oklahomanof Cherokee descent; he said that he was born “outside the rush of light,” like the characters in his playThe Cherokee Night (1932), a lament for the dissolution of Native American identity in the years afterOklahoma statehood. (“Too much Indian,” a mixed-blood outlaw says he’s been told as an explanationfor his crimes; “Not enough Indian,” a Cherokee elder replies.) Green Grow the Lilacs, which premiereda year earlier, is in part an elegy for Indian Territory. It climaxes with a sovereignty dispute: after Jeeterdies in a knife fight with Curly, the locals want to turn him over to the federal marshal until Laurey’sAunt Eller denounces them as “dirty ole furriners” for siding with the United States. Citing their “Indianblood,” the locals declare their allegiance to Indian Territory, but the play ends with Curly singing“Green Grow the Lilacs,” a melancholy ballad of unrequited love.A scene from Lynn Riggs’s “The Cherokee Night” as presented at theProvincetown Playhouse by the Community Theatre Division of the FederalTheatre Project, July 1936. Wikimedia CommonsOklahoma!, by contrast, presents a heterosexual union as the counterpart to national union, with Curlyembodying the country’s future in the title song: “Startin’ as a farmer with a brand new wife / Soon belivin’ in a brand new state!”—a celebration of westward expansion with nary a mention of NativeAmericans, beyond the musical’s stated setting in Indian Territory. Stephen Sondheim, whomHammerstein took under his wing in the summer when he was writing Oklahoma!, said in a recentinterview that his mentor “took a play that was about homosexuality in the West and turned it into asunny musical…beyond what Lynn Riggs had written, about the opening of territories, the promise ofAmerica.” (“The play had distinct homoerotic undertones in the relationship between Curly and Jeeter,”Sondheim clarified in an email to me; Hammerstein changed Jeeter’s name to Jud in the musical.)The promise of America certainly rings through Oklahoma! and its insistently jubilant exclamationpoint, although its sunniness has a dark side. Mary Kathryn Nagle, a Cherokee lawyer and playwright,puts the musical’s accomplishment differently: “Oklahoma statehood is the result of a series oflegislative acts that attempted to render my nation’s government illegal. Thus, the erasure of thesovereign tribal nations on whose land Oklahoma! takes place constitutes both an erasure of my Nationand an erasure of the story’s original Cherokee author: Lynn Riggs.”***The ensemble kicks up its cowboy-boot heels in Ashland’s 2018 “Oklahoma!”Photo: Jenny Graham / Oregon Shakespeare Festival“I LOVE OKLAHOMA!,” Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, told melast fall as he prepared to stage a new production of the musical, “and even as I love it, I’m aware thatit’s one of the ultimate artistic expressions of cisgendered heteronormativity, and that the puritanfounding of the country in terms of sexual expression hovers over the relationship betweenheteronormativity and white supremacy.” American audiences may be growing familiar with thisrelationship of late: in Paula Vogel’s Indecent, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s cast album signals a postwarend to the Yiddish theater’s lesbian potential; in Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, the musical’stitle number is repurposed as a satiric hymn to the KKK; in Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over, a recordingof Curly’s affirmation in “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning” that “everything’s going my way” plays inironic counterpoint to the young black men’s lives on stage, subject to police brutality. Most recently,Daniel Fish’s stripped-down revival of Oklahoma!, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, revealed anAmerican community forged through violence, with a wall of firearms flanking the stage and a blood-spattered finale, as the audience was uncomfortably invited to clap along to the reprise of “Oh, What ABeautiful Morning” after Curly guns down Jud Fry. The musical’s timeliness, it seems, comes from ourawareness of its complicity with oppressive power structures—and our own complicity in applaudingthem.The Oregon Shakespeare Festival staging, by contrast, offered a different sort of timeliness that mightprove even more radical and, perhaps, more sustaining: an expression of queer joy. (Disclosure: OSFhired me to write historical program notes for the 2018 season.) After twenty-five years gestating hisconcept, Rauch received permission from the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate to change the genders ofthe romantic couples: at OSF, Curley and Laurey were both women, and the secondary comic pair, WillParker and Ado Annie, became a male duo: Will and Ado Andy. (Both couples were also interracial.)Aunt Eller, the territory matriarch, was transgender; Ali Hakim, the clever Persian peddler, was bisexual;and the chorus included a range of gender-nonbinary characters (and straight allies). “At the most corelevel, I was looking for access for myself as a gay man to the material,” Rauch explained. “But as anartist it intrigued me: with cross-racial casting in so many classic musicals, could the material bear theweight of cross-gender casting, and what would it yield artistically?”Rauch had tried cross-gender casting in OSF’s racially inclusive Shakespeare productions, with womenplaying many traditionally male roles like Julius Caesar, Mercutio, and Hotspur, along with an all-female Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Rauch had seen Molly Smith’s multiracial production ofOklahoma! at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. in 2010, representing both the Obama era and thedemographics of Oklahoma at statehood, which was majority non-white (and far from straight). OSFhad also commissioned new work, like the genderqueer musical Head Over Heels (now on Broadway),which set a cross-dressing Renaissance romance to the Go-Go’s hits. But recasting the goldenest ofGolden Age musicals? “Honestly, I didn’t think it could be done,” Rauch admitted.Will Parker (Jordan Barbour, left) and Ado Andy (Jonathan Luke Stevens) tryto figure out their relationship in Ashland’s “Oklahoma!”. Photo: JennyGraham / Oregon Shakespeare FestivalThe result, however, played as a celebration of love in all its forms—and a radiant celebration at that,from the moment Tatiana Wechsler’s irrepressible Curly, silhouetted against the sunrise, serenaded the“bright golden haze on the meadow,” claiming the canonical American musical landscape for a queervoice, while Bobbi Charlton’s tenderly tart Aunt Eller churned butter downstage, to the finale, when anLGBTQ+ chorus sang Rodgers and Hammerstein’s refrain, “Let people say we’re in love,” as adeclaration of pride beneath a rainbow-hued moon. Hardly more than the gender pronouns werechanged, and yet the effect was of a familiar world refreshed, a founding American mythology expandedto represent territory folks who hadn’t made it onto the 1943 stage.“Country a-changin, got to change with it,” Curly declares (in a line Hammerstein lifted from Riggs),and the audience at the performances I saw cheered—and then whooped when Curly and Laurey or Willand Ado Andy kissed. Shadows still lurked: Jud Fry festered among pinups in his smokehouse, seethingthat Laurey would choose a woman like Curly over him, and Laurey’s dream ballet turned into anightmare that Jud would enforce traditional gender roles and brutalize Curly for transgressing them.But unlike Daniel Fish’s dark production, where Curly killed Jud with impunity, Wechsler’s Curly triedto save Jud from killing himself, and her ensuing trial seemed less a kangaroo court than the flexibilityof a community that would spare a black woman from frontier justice and defend her right to loveLaurey. Even the show’s corniness, its hoedown homily that the farmer and the cowhand (no longercowman) should be friends, seemed newly inclusive. Rather than turn a play about homosexuality, inSondheim’s terms, into a sunny musical about the promise of America, Rauch’s production proposedthat the promise of America at its sunniest comes from recognizing the range of identities that Americahas always encompassed (including two Native-identifying cast members).“I’ve thought a lot about Lynn Riggs and our responsibility to that author,” Rauch told me. “On theseventy-fifth anniversary of the musical that was to eclipse his original play, I hope he would feel hisspirit would be honored by what we’re doing.” (New Yorkers will get to see Rauch’s vision when heleaves OSF next year to become artistic director of the Perelman Center, a performing arts hub at theWorld Trade Center.)***RAUCH EXPERIMENTED WITH WAYS to stage the title song that would reflect more critically onthe musical’s embrace of manifest destiny, particularly the troubling line for a bunch of settlers to sing:“We know we belong to the land / And the land we belong to is grand.” He even enlisted the help of TyDefoe, an Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist who identifies as two-spirit, to choreograph a circledance that would “honor the original caretakers of the land,” in Rauch’s phrase. But he ended up feelingthat a full reckoning with Native American tribes in Indian Territory could “not fit in the Rodgers andHammerstein container.” Hammerstein was politically progressive (more so than Rodgers, whomSondheim recalled as a homophobe), writing a song against racist stereotypes, “You’ve Got To BeCarefully Taught,” for South Pacific and adapting Bizet’s opera Carmen for an American setting with anall-black cast. The film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song, though painfully dated,featured one of the largest Asian casts in any Hollywood production. Hammerstein also wrote an “IndianLove Call” for a 1924 musical called Rose-Marie, though its insipid warbling summons redfaceconventions more than any specific tribal language. And while he grappled with the sexuality of Riggs’sscript, writing that he had removed what he gingerly called its “vaguely Freudian flavor” and replaced itwith a “healthy gayety,” substituting laughter that was “lusty and boyish rather than smirky,” he seemsnot to have engaged with the Indianness of Indian Territory.In the world premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s “Manahatta,” Toosh-ki-pa-kwis-i (Rainbow Dickerson, right) tells Le-le-wa’-you (Tanis Parenteau) thatManahatta is no longer a safe place for the Lenape. Photo: Jenny Graham /Oregon Shakespeare FestivalAt OSF, Oklahoma! ran in repertory with the premiere of Mary Kathryn Nagle’s Manahatta, whichchronicles the displacement of the Lenape people from New York to Oklahoma. The play pointedlyinterweaves two time frames: the 17th century, when the Dutch West India Company maneuvers forcontrol of traditional Lenape trading grounds, erecting a wall in lower Manhattan to keep the Nativesout; and 2008, when a Lenape woman, Jane Snake, leaves her Oklahoma hometown to work on WallStreet for Lehman Brothers, packaging mortgage-backed securities as the housing crisis unfolds and hergrandmother’s home is foreclosed. The history of American finance becomes an echo of capitalist landfraud—the erasure not only of Native sites but also of tribal languages, matrilineal networks, andsustaining myths—and yet Nagle’s script also affirms Native resilience. “The Dutch built a wall, here,on this street, to keep us out. But I came back,” Snake says. “I am Lenape. We are still here.”Truett Felt, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Román Zaragoza, Lily Gladstone andensemble in the 2017 world premiere of Randy Reinholz’s “Off the Rails” inAshland. Photo: Jenny Graham / Oregon Shakespeare Festival“The whole world is doing Oklahoma!,” Nagle told me, “but most theaters have never produced a singleplay by a Native playwright.” She was excited that she was appearing alongside Lynn Riggs in the 2018OSF playbill—two Cherokee artists, following Choctaw playwright Randy Reinholz’s Off the Rails inthe previous season, an adaptation of Measure for Measure set in the nineteenth-century world of Indianboarding schools. (Next season will bring the sketch-comedy troupe The 1491s’ irreverent take onNative American history, Between Two Knees.) “The narrative that America has crafted for us is one oferasure,” Nagle said, “so most people who walk out of a theater learn that we no longer exist.” Shecontinued, “I don’t think we need to erase Oklahoma! or deny that it is one of the most popular musicalsin the world. I just want American theaters to invite Natives to be part of the conversation—whichmeans they must start actually producing our plays.”That’s a long-overdue conversation that’s starting to happen more and more. In Portland, for instance,Artists Rep produced Sicangu Lakota writer Larissa FastHorse’s satire The Thanksgiving Play andPortland Center Stage presented Cherokee playwright/performer DeLanna Studi’s And So We Walked,about a modern-day retracing of the Trail of Tears, during the 2017-18 season. And in developing theOklahoma! chorus at the Shakespeare Festival, Rauch invited the cast to create identities for theirensemble characters. One of the Native American actors, Román Zaragoza, chose the name “Riggs.”

The Hidden History of \u27Oklahoma!\u27

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The Hidden History of \u27Oklahoma!\u27

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