By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
According to first-time playwright Keith Miller, James Whitcomb Riley was the Robin Williams of his time.
Miller’s show, An Evening with James Whitcomb Riley, will stage at The Tarkington in the Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts, 3 Carter Green, Carmel, for one night only. The Reporter spoke with Miller about the play, the life of Riley (which includes some inverse plagiarism), and how just by going to this show you can help the kids at Riley Hospital for Children.
The play is based on a real event that happened in February 1894.
“Almost 132 years to the day from when we’re having our play at the Tarkington, James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain performed at the sold-out Madison Square Garden,” Miller said. “I’m a lifelong Hoosier. I’ve known about James Whitcomb Riley, and I just always had this idea that he was a poet in Indiana, kind of a crudgy old guy. And based on the pictures you saw of him, I didn’t really have a lot of other information. So when I found out he performed with Twain, I was really intrigued. As I did a deeper dive into it, Riley is as far from a stodgy individual as you can get. He was a character, I would say. I was thinking about it today. He was the Robin Williams of his time.”
That level of Robin Williams energy did not appeal to Mark Twain.
“Twain hated performing with him because Riley was such a showman and Twain was a wonderful author and humorist, but he wasn’t a performer. And as I was learning all this, it’s like, ‘Okay, how can I get this information out to people but yet still make it entertaining?’”
Miller’s solution was a play that takes the audience on stage to see Riley perform, and backstage at Madison Square Garden where he spends time between recitations of his poetry. There Riley spends time talking with a fictional character named Caleb Johnson. Thus, you get to know about the man and his poetry in one sitting.
“There’s even a couple of poems that are delivered backstage when we are having our conversation,” Miller said. “In the first scandal of Riley’s life, he tried to pass a poem off that he wrote as the work of Edgar Allan Poe. He got away with it for a long time until one of his coworkers ratted him out. He did it because he was having such difficulties breaking into mainstream literature. Riley fell into the newspaper business. He didn’t have any other option. He had to get a job. He couldn’t support himself. For most of his life, he lived hand to mouth.”
Riley, who was working for a newspaper in Anderson at the time, penned a poem in the style of Poe, then had a friend at a rival newspaper break a fake news story about the discovery of a lost Poe poem.
“It was two newspapermen in cahoots that drove this story,” Miller said. “Riley ultimately got fired from his job, not because plagiarized a poet, but because he let the other newspaper scoop him!”
The gamble paid off, though, because when the truth came out, the literature world took Riley more seriously.
Miller and Actors Theatre of Indiana have partnered with the Riley Hospital for Children to make it a fundraiser. Miller also has sponsors for this show, so more money from ticket sales can go to the hospital and the Riley Foundation. Those generous sponsors are listed in today’s edition.
“I’m a first-time playwright,” Miller said. “I’m a very well-rejected novelist. I’m still collecting rejected letters. But it’s really through my collaboration with director Richard J Roberts that we have, I think, a very good play. A lot of work has gone into this, and I think everyone will enjoy it. Whether you know Riley or not, you’re going to know him. You don’t need to know anything about him when you arrive. You’re going to know a lot about him – probably more than anyone that’s not been to the show – after you leave.”
Go to tinyurl.com/RileyPlayTickets for tickets for An Evening with James Whitcomb Riley so you can both enjoy the show and feel good about helping Riley Hospital for Children.
