David Remnick: The Thanksgiving Play is a play about the making of a play. It's also a very timely comedy about an awkward subject, the gap between the old story of the Thanksgiving holiday, the story we like to tell and grew up on, and what actually might have happened. If you think you might enjoy seeing well meaning liberals running afoul of their own good intentions, this is the play for you.

When the Thanksgiving Play premiered on Broadway last year, our critic, Vinson Cunningham, spoke with the playwright, Larissa FastHorse. She's the only Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.

Larissa FastHorse: I grew up in South Dakota, where my Lakota people are from. I was adopted at a young age, an open adoption to a white family who had worked on the reservation for a long time, the reservation that I'm from. I was always raised very aware of my Lakota identity and my Lakota culture, and they brought a lot of mentors into my life and elders to help me stay connected in that way. At the same time, I was growing up in a very white culture, and my first career was in classical ballet. It doesn't really get much whiter than that. I don't know, maybe opera, I'm not sure.

Vinson Cunningham: There's a list, but ballet is on the top.

Larissa FastHorse: They're way up there. Yes, they're always in the top five. At the time 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 I'd been away from my Lakota family so long, and that was very hard. Now, I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture and experiences and contemporary indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are the majority of audiences still in American theater.

Vinson Cunningham: Yes. I do want to go back to this thing about ballet because it does seem like this really important part of your life that you are a professional ballet dancer. How much did your training as a dancer, how much does that stay with you? Is that a part of your approach as a writer? Do you think about that often when you're working?

Larissa FastHorse: Oh, yes. My ballet background is hugely influential in my work as a playwright. First off, just in the work ethic, ballet dancers are expected to be shown something once and then you work on it on your own and you come back and you've got it down. People aren't going to sit there and spend a lot of time spoon feeding things or teaching you one thing at a time. You're expected to learn it. You're expected to do your own training at night, after six hours of classes and rehearsal. You're expected to do a lot on your own. That work ethic certainly has helped me as a playwright, where you spend months, sometimes alone in your home writing, and you could miss that deadline, no one's going to yell at you.

Also, you can really see it in my writing. There's a lot of movement based acting, I guess, text, free scenes in my work. The Thanksgiving Play is a perfect example. There's several scenes that have little to no text that are movement based, and they are moving the story forward, and they're essential to the story, but without using text or very little text and a lot of movement and gesture.

Vinson Cunningham: The Thanksgiving Play, it's about four people who, let's say present as white, trying to put on a play about the first Thanksgiving and trying and I think often failing to acknowledge this native presence that they are somehow trying to highlight. I was thinking a lot about, let's say, what's happening in Florida, about how we educate our children about topics that might make them feel, whatever, guilty or upset. How much of today's dramas over education and race and history were you thinking about with this new production?

Larissa FastHorse: Oh, a lot. Yes, I definitely have updated a lot for the times. It's interesting you mentioned Florida. The laws state if something causes, I think it's guilt, discomfort or anguish based on your race, it can't be taught in a school. You'll see those words in the play if you come to it.

I wanted to make sure that these people, because they are, I call it performative wokeness, these are white folks, liberal folks, trying really hard to do everything right and, as you said, getting everything wrong. I wanted to make sure that they're people of today and not someone you can look at. I don't want people to be able to say, "Oh, well, since 2020, we've changed, so this isn't me," because it definitely still is.

Vinson Cunningham: Right.

Larissa FastHorse: Interestingly, one of my first writing mentors was the great Merata Mita, who is a Māori writer and filmmaker from New Zealand, Aotearoa. She said to me at my very first screenplay that I wrote before I was writing plays, she said, "Larissa, you can be an artist or you can be an educator. If you try to be both, you'll do one of them badly. You have to pick one." I chose artist. She said, "There's certainly art that educates and there's education that's artistic, but you have to choose which one you are and stay true to that."

Vinson Cunningham: I imagine that that tension is exacerbated by the expectations of the audience, right?

Larissa FastHorse: Yes.

Vinson Cunningham: Just the way the arts happen in America, usually the audiences are white.

Larissa FastHorse: Right.

Vinson Cunningham: I think it's fair to say some people come to the theater on some level hoping to have some sort of educational experience as opposed to art. What I love about your play is that it's like, no, you're just going to laugh and it's going to feel weird. Is that something that you like to play with, or is it something that feels like a hurdle?

Larissa FastHorse: No, absolutely no. I love that.

Vinson Cunningham: One thing I love about this play, there's a character named Alicia, and she's played by D'Arcy Carden, a very funny, wonderful performer. She's hired on the assumption that she is a native person.

Larissa FastHorse: Right.

Vinson Cunningham: I thought about this because a lot of the literature that I was raised on, Black literature, passing is a big theme. What does passing mean to you on stage and off?

Larissa FastHorse: I'm a white passing in many ways, and yet at the same time, before I was writing, when I was acting for a while and the casting director said to me, "We can tell you're not completely white, and that's a problem." I was like, "Wow." I was like, "Okay, I'm done. There's nothing I can do about that."

Vinson Cunningham: Is that America's subtitle? Is that perhaps the whole thing?

Larissa FastHorse: Yes, that should be a little subtitle underneath United States of America. We can tell you're not white, it's a problem. I am very light skinned. Again, it was something that was sometimes painful because colorism is a thing in our communities, and it was sometimes painful that I was so light and white passing, growing up with a lot of full blood. My father is full blood, and they're much darker, my biological father. I had some pain over that growing up, and especially because then I was raised away from it, so like, "Who are you showing up again?"

However, then on the other side, on the white side, which is American theater, I am quite sure that I get into rooms that not white passing, native people would not get into.

Vinson Cunningham: It's funny, the other thing about Alicia is that she's brought in specifically, not just to be an actorly presence, but it's like, "We're going to use her expertise and we're going to--"

Larissa FastHorse: Oh, yes.

Vinson Cunningham: "What do you have to say? Please tell us."

Larissa FastHorse: The wisdom.

Vinson Cunningham: I would imagine that that has some corollary to your experience.

Larissa FastHorse: Oh, it's exhausting, I would say. I just can't imagine what it would be like to just, for a white male playwright, they just walk into a theater and they just a playwright and they don't do anything else. I can't imagine what that's like. I've never done it. I'm so fortunate with the career I've had, but I'm also the first one in 90% of the places I've worked, the first one in the theater, first one in-- It just goes on every-- I've got six shows this year, and it's like most of them, I'm the first Native American.

I guess this is the privilege of being the first, means that I also have responsibility. I do what I call Indian 101, that all of the staff has to come to, including front of house box office production, everybody, to help them understand indigenous culture, the space they're standing in, and most importantly, our audiences that we're hoping to welcome into the theater and how do we welcome them? Understanding that theater is a white culture, Western American theater is a white culture. The assumptions you're making of what's acceptable behavior in theater is completely different than what is normal behavior in so many cultures in this continent.

Vinson Cunningham: One of the great things about the Thanksgiving Play is that it spotlights so many things about theater that present to us as issues and actually say, "Well, do we really mean that?" I think we've all settled into an orthodoxy, let's say, of you can't play outside of your race, and ethnicity, whatever, your look. Of course, what that means is if there aren't indigenous roles to play, indigenous actors are never able to do that act of representation. In your experience, just working with actors and stuff, how have people started to think about that?

Larissa FastHorse: That's interesting because actually casting is still very complicated. Red Face is being done regularly all over our country on film and tv, on stages. There's so many non indigenous actors still playing indigenous roles, and there's so many people calling themselves indigenous that cannot in any way prove they're indigenous and have no actual connection to any indigenous community playing indigenous roles. People say they understand more and they're doing better and yet there they are, red face is being done constantly.

Conversely, fascinatingly, if you read the script of the Thanksgiving Play, I put in the character description that people of color who can pass for white should be considered for roles.

Vinson Cunningham: Right.

Larissa FastHorse: I was really proud of that, but when I get to New York, we were told we can't put that in the casting breakdown. You can't ask people to play someone else. I was like, "Wait, there are still white people on these stages in New York City right now playing native," this was a few years ago, "playing native, but you're saying I can't openly have non-white people play white people if they look white to you?" He's like, "No, you absolutely can't." I'm not allowed to ask people if they're Native American when they're being cast. We have to do this whole song and dance [unintelligible 00:11:03] try to figure it out by chit chat and seeing-- Then people get all mad because we cast a knot. Someone that turns out they weren't native or they didn't have a connection to the community. It's this constant thing, which is all part of what we're dealing within Thanksgiving Play.

Vinson Cunningham: One way of interpreting the show is that it's about the most far reaching implications of meaning well. It seems to me that the people that come to Broadway shows are these same well meaning people. I don't know, what has been the response to that. This is you, what do you know? How do you feel about that?

Larissa FastHorse: Oh, it's absolutely you. I do not hide that. I don't hide the fact that this is about white liberal folks which tend to be theater goers. Not all. I think the thing that I keep saying, but it's been very important to me in this play, was that first it's fun and that you get to have a good time in the theater. Second it's, I would say that's the sugar and then there's the medicine. It's the comedy within a satire. The satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it through it. Honestly, some people opt out. We've had a couple people walk out, and once it got too far in, they were just like, "No, this is too much."

Vinson Cunningham: I can imagine at least one scene where that might happen.

Larissa FastHorse: The vast majority of audiences are really raucously responsive, and really having a fun time. Last week, we had audience members talking to the stage, talking back, and it just got wild. They added six, seven, eight minutes to the show.

Vinson Cunningham: Whoa.

Larissa FastHorse: Yes, it was crazy.

Vinson Cunningham: That's a lot of talking.

Larissa FastHorse: It was a lot of talking, chatting, and clapping, and responding. We love that.

Vinson Cunningham: Something that I've wondered, because I think most people who live on Manhattan think about the Lenape only usually before a show or something, and then someone comes out and does a land acknowledgement and say, "This is the land of the Lenape people." How do you feel about that practice?

Larissa FastHorse: Land acknowledgement, honestly, I know in some places were getting a little tired of it, but I will say it's not everywhere. For me, until everybody in the United States of America can name the indigenous land they're standing on, we need to keep doing it.

Vinson Cunningham: Good. Yes.

Larissa FastHorse: I always say, too, though, land acknowledgement is a step. It's the first step of many steps toward reparation. You have to at least know who reparations are owed to for the land that you're on, who are you paying rent to, and then you need to start paying the rent.

Vinson Cunningham: Thank you so much for doing this. You're just so wonderful.

Larissa FastHorse: Of course. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's so much fun.

David Remnick: That's Larissa FastHorse speaking with staff writer, Vinson Cunningham, last year when the Thanksgiving Play premiered on Broadway. It's been produced all over the country.

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