The Mint Theater Company recovers yet another worthy, long-lost drama by a neglected author with its neat production of Sump’n Like Wings, which opened Thursday at Theatre Row. Composed by Southwestern poet and playwright Lynn Riggs in 1925, the play was seen briefly in Detroit a few years later but the Mint’s staging marks its New York premiere.
The best known among Riggs’ thirty plays – several appeared on Broadway – is Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), later the basis for Oklahoma! An informative essay regarding the Oklahoma native’s 1899-1954 life and career is available in Mint’s typically generous program notes (also on its website), so let’s skip those details.
Like many another play by Riggs, Sump’n Like Wings happens in a small Oklahoma town, this time during the middle 1910s. His story sympathetically centers upon Willie, a restless sixteen-year-old girl whose overworked mother, Mrs. Baker, guards her from boys and similar temptations. Mrs. Baker runs a restaurant in the frowsy hotel owned by Uncle Jim, her reclusive brother, who worries how such repressive treatment will affect his free-spirited niece Willie. “You cain’t keep her in a place that’s got a lid on it,” Uncle Jim asserts. “She’s got sump’n inside of her like wings, and she’ll beat off the cover, and she’ll go away …” Willie herself recognizes the urge, saying, “They’s sump’n in you ‘at has to be free – like – like a bird, or you ain’t livin’.”
Influenced by a bad acquaintance, Willie runs off with feckless “Boy” Huntington, a married man and a loser. Two years later Willie returns with a baby by way of some other guy she may have wed (or not), hoping to live and work in better harmony with Mrs. Baker at the restaurant. Willie soon realizes that her mother intends to strictly police her activities. The otherwise-married Boy is back in town, too, and how Willie again responds to his advances is revealed among other developments during the play’s later episodes.
Crafted by Riggs in an easygoing regional dialect, Sump’n Like Wings studies a strained mother-child relationship and the rebel daughter’s development as an individual. More poignantly, the play considers young, inarticulate souls yearning to fly away in pursuit of a better life, even if they don’t know what that may be.
Gently staged by director Raelle Myrick-Hodges, Mint’s good-looking production is performed fairly well by an 11-member company. A stern Mrs. Baker, Julia Brothers anchors the drama with a stiff spine and a perpetual frown that can curdle into a grimace. Aided by Emilee McVey-Lee’s strategic costume design, Mariah Lee conveys Willie’s growing maturity. One wonders whether Lee’s frequently cross-armed stance indicates Willie’s defensive posture in a harsh environment or does she suggest Willie keeps trying to suppress her desires? Lukey Klein gives his treble-voiced Boy Huntington a wheedling persistency in manner that could wear down any girl.
A highlight is a pleasant party when ice cream is served, Uncle Jim strums upon a dulcimer and a youthful guest nicely portrayed by Leon Pintel sings a plaintive little ballad. The figure of Uncle Jim, a 50s-something bachelor whose kindly, if usually distracted, presence sweetens the story, is interesting to view with the latter-day awareness that the playwright was a gay man and so could be this character. Not a trace of lavender, however, is discernable in the amiable, rumpled fellow imbued with genuine warmth by Richard Lear. Boldly embodying a wicked teenager who disappears after the opening scene, Lindsey Steinert is so striking that her absence is missed. Among others in the company, Andrew Gombas plays a harassed sheriff and later a drunken lout, both quite believably. Everybody does well by their flat, at times twangy, Southwestern accents.
Aptly and economically designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee, an airy setting of weathered clapboards presents an open vista beyond the hotel dining room where certain characters can wander outside of the story. The sound and music arrangements credited to Sean Hagerty provides effective touches of guitar and fiddles during the play. The pre-show and intermission soundtrack, given over to vintage recordings of Eddie Cantor, John McCormack and others singing patriotic numbers of the World War I era, might be accurate to the 1913-1916 span of the play but their martial content has nothing to do with its story, place or characters. But let’s not quibble over minor details when in so many ways, Mint’s production treats so tenderly a relatively fragile 99 year-old piece of American drama.
