The Playwright Larissa FastHorse on “The Thanksgiving Play,” Broadway’s New Comedy of White Wokeness

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that’s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. “First it’s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that’s the sugar, and then there’s the medicine,” the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it.” FastHorse was born into the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and was adopted as a child into a white family. She is the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. “When I was younger, it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things that I felt like I couldn’t partake in because I wasn’t raised on the reservation or had been away from my Lakota family so long,” she says. “But now I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture . . . and contemporary Indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are still the majority of audiences in American theatre.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.7	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you want to see some of the more extreme examples of liberally minded people bending themselves into pretzels to show that they're woke,
0:25.5	you could tune into Fox News, which has a particular dedication to that theme.
0:30.4	Or if you want a more comedic version of it, you could see the Thanksgiving play,
0:34.2	which opens on Broadway this week and has already been produced around the country.
0:37.3	It's a play about the making of a play. The four performers struggle to
0:39.4	devise a Thanksgiving play that is somehow respectful of Native peoples and historically accurate,
0:46.5	but they also don't want to make the audience feel terrible about American history. And they want to
0:51.2	make the performers themselves feel included in the process of writing it.
0:55.7	If that sounds like a train wreck, well, that's what happens.
0:59.8	The playwright is Larissa Fast Horse, and she belongs to the Sikangu Lakota Nation,
1:05.6	and she's the first Native American woman with a play produced on Broadway.
1:09.9	I wanted to talk to Larissa not only because of the humor and the sharp wit and the sort of structural tightness that you find in her work, but also because she has become, just by dint of her identity, kind of a foremost voice about native presence in the arts and how our artistic culture
1:32.0	feeds into and is a consequence of the larger culture in a way that almost no one else working
1:38.0	in America is today.
1:39.2	That's the New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham.
1:41.5	He spoke the other day with Larissa Fast Horse.
1:47.0	I grew up in South Dakota,
1:54.1	where my Lakota people are from, but I was adopted at a young age and open adoption to a white family who had worked on the reservation for a long time, the reservation that I'm from.
1:58.1	I was always raised very aware of my Lakota identity and my
2:01.5	Lakota culture. And they brought a lot of mentors into my life and elders to help me stay
2:06.9	connected in that way. But at the same time, I was growing up in a very white culture. And
	...

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