(upbeat music)
- The Thanksgiving Play is on Broadway this spring.
It's a new comedy satire from Native American playwright
Larissa FastHorse, and in fact she's now
the first Native American female to have a play produced
on Broadway.
Here's Beth Stevens
with another edition of Building Broadway
- Thanks Tamsen.
Playwright, Larissa FastHorse is making her Broadway debut
with The Thanksgiving Play, a satirical comedy
that skewers the mythology of the holiday.
I spoke with her at the Hayes Theater.
(gentle music)
So you go up in South Dakota.
- Yes.
- And now you're on Broadway.
How does it feel to be on Broadway?
- It feels amazing to be on Broadway.
It's really exciting.
It's very busy as you see a lot of people around.
You know, it's because it's something that like
I didn't understand what it was even growing up.
Like I said, I thought it was like a street named Broadway
and then all the theaters were on that little street.
I didn't realize how huge Broadway is as far as, you know
expansiveness and reach and everything.
And now it's just really exciting.
I really had a goal to be on,
I really didn't wanna be the first Native American
female playwright on Broadway.
And as far as we know, I am,
I'm sure there probably were others
that we just aren't aware of.
But of the first one we know.
It meant a lot to me to do that
and to be able to say I was that woman.
- This play has been produced a lot.
- Yeah.
- Not on Broadway until now.
- Nope.
- Why do you think it's speaking
to so many different kinds of people?
- It's a comedy, right?
I mean, it's a comedy within a satire,
but it's very heavily a comedy.
And I think we all need that desperately.
And I do not say this tritely at all,
I lost people during Covid in my family,
but I think after that experience,
we desperately need to be side by side with real humans
like I am here and we need to be able to laugh together.
And then I think we also do wanna think about things.
And I think the play is definitely landing differently now
since the last couple years than it did before that.
And we've really updated a lot of it for
with Broadway because of that.
- You have committed so much of your career
to telling the stories of indigenous people
and here we have a show with four white people.
- Yes.
- Tell me about that decision.
- Yeah, you know what?
It honestly was a strategic decision.
Originally, I was having a really hard time
getting my plays produced more than once
because I did have Native American casts
and people kept saying they were uncastable.
I know that's not true.
Many of us knew that wasn't true,
but I just couldn't seem to break through that barrier.
So I gave myself the challenge of writing a play
about four white presenting people that still deal
with all the issues of contemporary indigeneity
that I'm experiencing
and that people in my community are experiencing.
You know, first it was a challenge.
I was kind of upset,
but once I wrote the play, I loved the play.
It really says all the things that I wanted to say
and it deals with the issues I wanted to deal with,
but just with these four beautiful people.
(Larissa laughing)
- Is it meaningful for you to be here at the Hayes Theater?
- Yeah, the Helen Hayes, especially because one,
is a theater named for a woman,
but also I had my husband take my picture
in front of this theater years ago,
in front of the little theater just because I love it.
And I was like, you know, if I was gonna have a play
on Broadway, this is kind of the perfect space.
And I just love the size of it.
There's enough people, but still intimate.
No seat is too far away.
And I was like, this is the perfect spot
for one of my plays.
And here we are.
- Well, let's go inside and check it out.
- Okay, let's do it.
(bright music)
- And here we are.
- I know, welcome to our set.
- So we're in a classroom
and this whole play is set in a theater classroom.
- Yes. - But you just said
that you thought of Broadway as a street.
- Yes.
- Which makes me think that you
didn't have a lot of theater training growing up.
- No, I didn't.
I was a classical ballet dancer in my first career
so I was worried about ballet studios and you know, plies.
I was not a theater person at all growing up.
I was around theater, all my friends were in theater.
So, because I was the only one that wasn't
I ran the concession stand.
So I saw all the plays they were in,
but it was not something that I did.
- So what was the germinal idea for this play?
- Ooh, yeah.
So this play was, you know,
after I gave myself that challenge to you know
make it with four, you know, non-indigenous people
I then had to think,
well what is it that is something, honestly beloved,
something we all know that feels very American
in a lot of ways that also pertains to indigenous issues
and Thanksgiving was just obvious.
And so I started doing research on Thanksgiving and thinking
about the world I work in, which is a mostly, you know,
a liberal well-meaning group of folks
and predominantly white still.
And I started thinking about,
well what are the things they're struggling with?
What are the things I'm struggling with with them?
And then how do we wrap all that
around this really recognizable moment
which is Thanksgiving.
- You're not just sending up these well-meaning people
you're also sending up Los Angeles actors
and actors in general.
So tell me about writers - Writers.
- because they're trying to create a play
about Thanksgiving as for well-meaning white people.
So tell me about poking holes
in that mythology around the holiday.
- Yeah, I mean, you know, my goal in this too is that it's
even though it's kind of written
for my more white liberal colleagues
to maybe do some looking at themselves
and why they express themselves the way they do,
but also is meant to be fun.
So I want it to be something that everyone can laugh at
and everyone can laugh at each other and nobody gets away
from this play without being laughed at in some way.
And so then taking that into this holiday was fun too
because then I gotta bring all these
different points of view into Thanksgiving.
We tend to think of just the one version
with the pilgrims and the Indians and this happy thing.
But there's also people, as I learned all over the country
that celebrate Thanksgiving very differently
and at very different dates and very different times.
And people have different perspectives
if you're indigenous or not, et cetera
and so it was really fun to be able to take all of that
and just wrap it into this one basic topic.
- What's the message that you baked into this cake?
- All of my plays, I say that they're one act plays,
you know and I say the first act happens
here in the space, on the stage like this,
the second act happens after you leave
and if there isn't a second act, then I've failed
my goals as a writer.
But I want people to leave, you know
thinking and questioning
and wondering why they didn't know some of these things,
why they're offended by some of these things.
You know, I want people to really be questioning like, why?
Why is this new information?
There are parts in The Thanksgiving Play
that we tell very accurately.
And it's funny cause some people are like, oh
you're so harsh.
I was like, no, we're just telling the truth.
And if you think the truth is harsh, this is, you know
think about that.
Why do you think just hearing the truth is too harsh
when it's what happened?
- The interstitial moments in this play are hilarious.
But it sounds like you did a few YouTube dives.
- Yeah, I went online
and I started researching Thanksgiving things for children,
'cause this is a classroom that we're in,
an educational space and I was horrified.
I mean, all of those scenes that you see in the play
and all of the comments are all directly from the internet
within the past, you know, six, seven years.
- Oh wow. - It,
we're still teaching children some pretty
frightening pageantry and songs and things
around Thanksgiving that we should not be teaching them.
- You're writing so many comedies.
- Yeah. - Tell me where
this comes from in your background.
- From being Native American for sure.
Indians always say you gotta laugh or cry.
We're living like the longest dark, dark comedy
in history and we're still here and we still survived
so we have to laugh about it.
And then that's just like base level Native American culture
at this point.
We'll say you get two Indians together
you'll know where they are
because they're the people laughing really loud.
So it's just natural.
- So for people who don't know
why don't you tell us a little bit
about your background, you're Lakota?
- Yeah, my birth mother is from California
and so I was born there but was only there a few months
and we, my birth father brought me back to South Dakota
where my tribe is from.
I'm from the Sicangu Lakota nation
which is the government calls us the Rosebud Sioux tribe,
but that's our name for ourselves.
And then I was adopted when I was about a year old
as an open adoption.
My parents had known my birth father
and his family for a while.
And so I lived on a border town and grew up in South Dakota.
So even though my adoptive parents were white,
they really were careful to be sure
that they kept elders and indigenous presence in,
well, in this case, Lakota presence in my life
you know, growing up and made sure I always had access
to that part of myself and my culture.
- I read that you call yourself a translator
and I love that because I think
that, that's what these people are failing at
let's put it, trying and failing.
And also I think that your audiences are probably
mostly not Native American, especially on Broadway.
- Yeah. - So tell me
about translating.
- You know, it's hard when you're growing up, you know
being raised off the reservation and farther away
from my family, my birth family,
you know, there's a lot of pain in that actually,
as far as, you know, my parents are amazing
and wonderful and we're so close
and they gave me everything.
But, you know, culturally, I always felt
like I wasn't enough, you know, I wasn't enough Lakota
I wasn't, you know, I wasn't fully white, I was just kind of
in between and that was kind of hard when I was young.
But now as I've grown up, I've realized
that that's my superpower, that I can translate.
I'm sort of a bridge between contemporary indigenous culture
and, you know, white culture basically,
which is unfortunately still what most of theater is
as you said.
So I can take those experiences and and translate them
for each other and show them in a way
that works on a stage like this and Broadway.
- Do you feel that certain lines land differently
with different people?
- Oh, absolutely.
And they're intended to, you know, I have lines
in there that are specifically for my Native American folks
and when that line comes up I can say, oh, there they are.
I can hear, I hear you, you know
'cause I hear 'em laughing, I know where they're sitting.
There's certain lines that are definitely
for like your educators or for your theater people or
for people that wanna laugh at educators and theater people
you know, there's definitely specific jokes that hit harder
with certain audiences.
But then I also have certain jokes
like the very first joke is what I call the unifying joke.
It's the very first joke of this show
within the first minute or two couple minutes
is a unifying joke that has nothing to do with race,
socioeconomic status, education, theater, whatever.
It's just a really funny joke
and so that we know
that it's all a safe space to laugh together.
(bright music)