FOREWORD
This play came to us late in the season of 1926-1927. Produced by George Auerbach at the American Laboratory Theater in New York, it attracted some attention during April and May, and survived without serious damage the ordeal of criticism by several of the front-line reviewers. With two or three exceptions, however, the notices showed little understanding of what Mr. Riggs was trying to do.
That is one reason why I am presuming to add these few words to the dramatist’s text.Big Lakeis that rarest of things, a poetic drama that is at once poetry and drama. To one of his later plays Mr. Riggs has given the titleSump’n Like Wings, and I can think of no words that so accurately describe what I felt when, over a year ago, I read the manuscript ofBig Lake. There is a winged lightness in the words that the poet puts into the mouths of his young people, an ecstasy born of the sheer joy of being alive. How poor a thing is the mere “observation” of a clever playwright beside the deeper,more incisive and highly intuitive scenes inBig Lake!
In calling Mr. Riggs a poet (I refer here not to his formal verse-making, but to his plays) I am not forgetting that poetry in the theater is a different thing from the poetry you read in a book: Mr. Riggs’ plays are stage pieces; the poetry in them is never a matter of mere words, but an integral part of the speeches uttered and the gestures made by the characters, directing each scene and permeating the whole. It lies first in the writer’s conception of a harmonic entity, and floods it from beginning to end.
Mr. Riggs’ three full-length plays are the work of a young man who is still close enough to his youth to remember and understand those fleeting moments of exaltation and depression that constitute the glory and the tragedy of adolescence. InBig Lake, more especially than inA Lantern To See ByandSump’n Like Wings, Mr. Riggs has been able on occasion to look at the world about him through the eyes of a child: can you not feel in the second scene of the first act something of the wonder and terror of the more wildly romantic stories of the Brothers Grimm?
If this Foreword were a study, I should go onto point out how Lynn Riggs has taken the folk-material and the idiom of his native district and skillfully made of them a rich medium of expression, and explain how, with only the slightest technical manipulation, he has reproduced the subtle rhythms of everyday speech. Then I should also have to take him to task for an occasional awkwardness in the management of his plots. But my purpose here is not to criticize: it is to point out to you a new American dramatist, whose work is permeated by an odd and strangely haunting beauty.
Barrett H. Clark.
August, 1927.