The characters themselves, and much of their dialogue, came directly from Green Grow the Lilacs. (Aunt Eller was an amalgam of Riggs’ Aunt Mary and his mother, Rose Ella.) But as Riggs watched the adaptation, the differences must have been striking. Gone were the traditional folk songs he’d woven throughout his play. The musical numbers in Oklahoma! had been crafted with New York audiences in mind. Theatergoers sitting a mile from the Empire State Building might have chuckled to hear a cowboy sing about Kansas City: “They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high, / About as high as a buildin’ orta grow.” Instead of square dancing, the actors broke into exuberant dance routines choreographed by Agnes de Mille.
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 31,000-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 1800s. The 1900 U.S. census reported that more than 97 percent of people living in the territory belonged to one of four native groups: the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Creek and the Cherokee. Riggs was a member of the Cherokee Nation, and Claremore—where both the play and the musical took place—was the town where he’d been born.
This is where the musical split with its source material. In a climactic scene from Green Grow the Lilacs, Aunt Eller scolds her neighbors, saying, “Why, the way you’re sidin’ with the federal marshal, you’d think us people out here lived in the United States! … Whut’s the United States? It’s jist a furrin country to me.” The neighbors respond with a chorus of protests: “Now, Aunt Eller, we hain’t furriners.” “My pappy and mammy was both borned in Indian Territory!” “Why, I’m jist plumb full of Indian blood myself!” “Me, too! And I c’n prove it!”
This exchange doesn’t appear in the musical. Instead, the title song features a jubilant chant: “Brand new state, gonna treat you great!” Rodgers and Hammerstein admired Riggs’ play, which had appeared on Broadway for just under two months in early 1931. But they were also New Yorkers putting on a show in wartime. In their hands, Oklahoma! became a patriotic celebration—new stars on the flag, new places for U.S. citizens to call home.
For Riggs, the notion of home was more complicated. He was 43 years old and serving in the Army. He’d left Claremore in his early 20s, but he’d never stopped writing plays and poems about his birthplace. In Riggs’ Oklahoma, it wasn’t easy to be a small-town Cherokee boy who was not only ambitious but also gay.