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History March 30, Lynn Riggs wrote the play that served as the basis of the hit musical.

Before ‘The Gayborhood’

On March 30,a middle-aged man named Lynn Riggs sat in a Broadway theater, watching the final rehearsal for Oklahoma! The first collaboration between Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the show was about to change musical theater forever. Before, the form centered around jaunty song-and-dance numbers, without much else connecting them.

But in Oklahoma! Characters had important conversations in song and expressed a wide range of emotions. He was a playwright, and Oklahoma! I kept many of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them at all for the simple reason that they could not be improved on—at any rate, not by me.

The story itself is simple and lighthearted. Much of it centers on a cowboy named Curly McLain and a farmhand named Jud Fry, both of whom are in love with the same girl, Laurey Williams. The characters themselves, and much of their dialogue, came directly from Green Grow the Lilacs.

But as Riggs watched the adaptation, the differences must have been striking. The musical numbers in Oklahoma! The most profound changes centered on the culture of the characters. Both stories are set at a time when the land these fictional Oklahomans lived on was known widely as Indian Territory —a 31,square-mile area where the federal government had been sending the Native groups it uprooted from their homelands in the north and east since the early s.

The U. This is where the musical split with its source material. But they were also New Yorkers putting on a show in wartime. In their hands, Oklahoma! For Riggs, the notion of home was more complicated. He was 43 years old and serving in the Army. Riggs was a student at the University of Oklahoma when a bout of tuberculosis drained his energy and left him in despair in Riggs took his teacher up on the suggestion.

But Santa Fe was a revelation. Riggs met free-thinking writers and painters and visited nearby pueblosor Native communities. Unlike the displaced Cherokee of Oklahoma, Native American groups near Santa Fe had been living on or near the same land for hundreds of years.

In Santa Fe, Riggs also saw men, including Bynner, engaging in romantic relationships with other men. The young playwright shared their sexual orientation but lacked their confidence. So it's fascinating to me how Lynn Riggs entered that world, but he was a Native person. During a visit home inRiggs wrote to Bynner:.

The forces of earth rise to crush the weak things, the tortoises without a protective shell. This later complication which you know about, dear Hal would have been little difficulty had there not been earlier, unsolved ones. You would understand if you were here in this squalor and dirt and misery and harshness from which I have never been absent.

Riggs spent the fall of teaching in Chicago, where he started writing his first full-length play, Big Lakea tragedy set in Indian country.