The Playwright Larissa FastHorse on The Thanksgiving Play, Broadways New Comedy of White Wokeness
\u201cThe Thanksgiving Play\u201d is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that\u2019s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. \u201cFirst it\u2019s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that\u2019s the sugar, and then there\u2019s the medicine,\u201d the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. \u201cThe satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it.\u201d 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. \u201cWhen I was younger, it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things that I felt like I couldn\u2019t partake in because I wasn\u2019t raised on the reservation or had been away from my Lakota family so long,\u201d she says. \u201cBut 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.\u201d