playwright beside the deeper,[Pg viii] more incisive and highly intuitive scenes in Big Lake!

[Pg viii]

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. In Big Lake, more especially than in A Lantern To See By and Sump’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 on[Pg ix] to 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.

[Pg ix]

 Barrett H. Clark. 

Barrett H. Clark.

August, 1927.

PART ONE

CHARACTERS

Betty

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