National Museum of the American Indian Hosts Production of Green Grow the Lilacs by the U.S. Naval Academy

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian will host a production of the play Green Grow the Lilacs by the late Cherokee dramatist Lynn Riggs Wednesday, Nov. 17, and Thursday, Nov. 18, at its Washington, D.C., location. The play, which was later made into the hit musical Oklahoma!, will be performed by the U.S. Naval Academy’s theater troupe, the Masqueraders.

Riggs (1899 – 1954) was the only American Indian dramatist writing for the Broadway stage at the beginning of the 20th century. As a child of the Cherokee Nation, he witnessed firsthand the rapid demographic, cultural and legal changes of his community when, in 1907, Indian Territory became Oklahoma, the 46th state in the union and subject to federal laws. For the 35 American Indian tribes forced into Indian Territory, the transition into federal statehood challenged already tenuous notions of community, culture and place.

This childhood experience inspired Green Grow the Lilacs, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama about the Cherokee Nation’s struggle to endure the social upheaval and forced migration of the early 1900s. “The tension in this play is not between cowboys and farmers, as it is in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical version,” said Christy Stanlake, director of the Naval Academy Theatre and a Native American theater scholar. “Rather, it is between Cherokee community-based ways of life and the way of life that is infiltrating Indian Territory as non-Native people come into the region. Literally, the Cherokee community is being overrun by the ideals of Manifest Destiny.”

The Naval Academy’s production will re-examine the risks that Riggs took in writing Green Grow the Lilacs, and the ways it challenged long-held beliefs about American Indian identity and survival.

“The Native elements that Riggs often included in his works were not only greatly experimental in the theater, they thwarted the law; Native American drumming was still illegal in many states in the 1930s,” Stanlake said. “For almost 80 years, this play has been produced as if it harbors no Native presence, but if you really look at the script, you see characters asserting Native American intellectual traditions and ceremonial actions relating people to one another and the land around them. This is the beauty of Riggs’ writing. He introduced a Native theatrical language onto the Broadway stage when most portrayals of Native people were pure stereotype.”

For a complete schedule of the museum’s free public performances and programs, visit www.AmericanIndian.si.edu.

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