Willie Baker (Mariah Lee, foreground) left home at 16 and has now returned after two years away, with a new baby in tow, held by Willie's mother, Mrs. Baker (Julia Brothers), in Lynn Riggs's Sump'n Like Wings.
Playwright Lynn Riggs is best remembered for Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) because it was the basis for Oklahoma! (1943). Now his play Sump’n Like Wings is having its New York debut 99 years after it was written. Such resurrection of a forgotten work is the core mission of the Mint Theater, as are the deep research and care that inform its meticulously crafted productions.
In a Playbill article, dramaturg Amy Stoller comments, “So many of Lynn Riggs’ plays have been ignored by contemporary audiences because … the whole story of Lynn Riggs has become, ‘He wrote the play that became the basis of a great American musical.’ He is such a fascinating playwright, and his work deserves to stand on its own.” This Mint production of Sump’n Like Wings, under the direction of Raelle Myrick-Hodges, successfully makes the case.
Willie's longtime suitor Boy Huntington (Lukey Klein, right) dances with Opalena (Leon Pintel), whose mother is the housekeeper at the St. Francis Hotel, where Willie and her mother live.
The play is set in Oklahoma in 1913–16, just a few years after statehood. Another hallmark of the Mint is the expert use of dialect: Stoller, who also served as dialect designer, has helped the actors speak Riggs’s representation of regional speech, where “yesterday” becomes “yistiddy”; “catch,” “ketch”; “maybe,” “mebbe”; and so on. The cast, for the most part, makes this seem effortless and unaffected, with particular standouts in Mariah Lee’s Willie Baker and Julia Brothers’s Mrs. Baker.
Willie is just 16 at the play’s outset, an untamed “wildcat” kept locked up by her mother, not even allowed to attend school, to keep her away from boys. Mrs. Baker runs the dining room of a hotel in Claremont, Okla., owned by her brother, Uncle Jim (Richard Lear), affectionately known to Willie as “Watt Jim” based on her childhood inability to say “uncle.” Jim is a neurotic who hasn’t ventured the short distance to Main Street in years; he’s affable and comic, but there are darker undercurrents hinted at.
A guest at the inn (one of two characters portrayed by Mike Masters, who is excellent) shares some local gossip about Elvie Rapp, a “jail-bird” who freed seven male prisoners. Mrs. Baker, so strict with Willie, takes a surprisingly blasé attitude toward Elvie and hires her: “Ain’t none of my affair. I need help—that’s whut.” Uncle Jim worries about Willie’s exposure to this “bad woman.” Elvie, brought vividly to life by Linsey Steinert in just one scene, acts as a dark glimpse for Willie into what a woman has to do to be free if she has no other options to escape literal and metaphorical cell bars:
And you don’t know how fin’lly you git sick, sick inside of yer head, so you’d do anything—anything at all to git free, to git away. It ain’t that you wanta go anywheres. It’s the idy of the bars that makes you mad. The bars git in yer mind, and you’d do anything to break em down, to git rid of em.—
Willie bids an emotional farewell to her Uncle Jim (Richard Lear). Photographs by Maria Baranova.
As part of her (somewhat confusingly explained) plan to be free, Elvie has sex with the seven male prisoners before releasing them. Willie, in less desperate circumstances, also has nowhere to turn but to men: she leaves home and returns with a baby after her husband has left her; and then she absconds a second time, with Boy Huntington (Lukey Klein), a married oilfield worker who has been hounding her for years. Dramaturgical advisor Jesse Marchese speculates that Riggs’s outsider status—he was part Cherokee and a gay man—“made him particularly sensitive to the plight of women.” Willie, for all her inarticulate rage, fully understands the irony of her position:
I was goin away—to keep from bein tied up. Now I’m marryin you—marryin to be free! Can you beat that? Marryin to be free! Who’s the joke on?
Every scene but the final one, which is set in a disreputable rooming house in Claremont, takes place at Uncle Jim’s hotel. Junghyun Georgia Lee’s sets and Emilee McVey-Lee’s costumes richly evoke the time and place, which, along with the actors’ dialects, make this feel like a near-immersive experience. Some parts of the play, however, are repetitive or opaque, as though an early draft; some of the acting is uneven, but for the most part the ensemble is excellent. Seemingly small moments pack an emotional punch and are beautifully staged, such as a song sung by Opalena (Leon Pintel), the housekeeper’s daughter. The final scene, with Willie defiant but afraid as she’s surrounded by threats of sexual violence and facing a harrowing future, contains a raw power and achieves the goal of demonstrating that Riggs’s work deserves an audience.
Sump’n Like Wings runs through Nov. 2 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday–Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting minttheater.org.
Playwright: Lynn Riggs
Director: Raelle Myrick-Hodges
Sets: Junghyun Georgia Lee
Costumes: Emilee McVey-Lee
Lighting: Isabella Gill-Gomez
Sound: Sean Hagerty
