America's "folk-drama" of the 1920's and 1930's appears a last stand of nineteenth-century regionalism…. [It] was a brief movement which capitalized on the quaintness and charm, the eccentricity and even grotesqueness, of character, dialect, and setting. There was some necessary superficiality in a tradition that relied too much on entertaining a sophisticated cosmopolitan audience with a parade of characters—or caricatures—from a province. Another rather superficial motive shows in this drama when it was locally produced: the region's own pride in its individuality. But the folk drama did often strive toward the expression of universal human problems and lasting values.
In both aspiration and achievement, the outstanding playwright produced by this movement in the United States was Paul Green…. Green knew intuitively the struggles of an unsophisticated people against the forces of both nature and society. These were the "folk" in whom Green found universal human values laid bare. When he began writing plays in the 1920's, he was immediately attracted to the so-called "folk" drama of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, to such plays as Riders to the Sea and Playboy of the Western World. In his own region Green saw a native character parallel to that dramatized by Synge, and his natural impulse was, like Synge's, poetic: he converted folk idiom to poetry and drew the regional character in terms of eternal conflicts. (pp. 91-2)
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