The Thanksgiving Play came into being, more or less, as a dare. When theater companies told Larissa FastHorse that her script featuring Indigenous characters What Would Crazy Horse Do? was virtually “uncastable”, she set out to write a show featuring zero actors from any minority group. In a somewhat dispiriting twist, the stunt worked. The Thanksgiving Play has become one of the most produced pieces of theater in the US.
The work centers on a quartet of theater nerds who meet in an elementary school classroom to craft a dramatic rendition of the Thanksgiving story that will possess adequate levels of accuracy and sensitivity. When it emerges that the professional actor who was hired to lend an Indigenous voice to the writers’ room is not, in fact, Native American, the classroom becomes a frantic workshop of wokeness, and the meta production plunges headlong into a state of absurdity that had viewers at a recent masked matinee howling into their N95s. FastHorse’s work is a scandalously entertaining turducken of identity politics and humor, taking aim at the buffoonery of the white-run theater world and the paralysis that can go hand in hand with over-analysis. Audiences will come for the jokes about virtue signaling and “vegan allyship” and leave with a queasy sense of confusion and self-loathing.
“I truly want the audience to feel invited to the conversation and to have fun,” FastHorse said over a video call from the New York apartment where she has been staying in the lead-up to the play’s Thursday premiere. “I don’t want people to come in and feel like they’re being attacked or bashed over the head.”
FastHorse estimates that 80% of the too-dopey-to-be-true lines came from real interactions. Jackson, the earnest “yoga guy” who wears a voluminous scarf and is given to excusing himself to “meditate on my feelings” was based on a yoga instructor FastHorse had in Los Angeles, where she lives. “He was all over the place as a white dude,” she said. “I drew from the way he expressed himself and the way he talked about Indigenous people in general. He was really deeply excited about the fact that I am Native American and was in his presence.”
FastHorse, who belongs to the Sicangu Lakota Nation, grew up in Pierre, South Dakota. Her school librarian mother and her father, a corrections worker with a sociology degree, closely monitored her cultural consumption. PBS programming was allowed, so she loaded up on Keeping Up Appearances and Monty Python, among other British comedies that would inform her dry humor. Her heritage also shaped her sardonic sensibility. “Native Americans are living like the world’s longest dark comedy,” FastHorse said. “I mean, we just have to laugh.”
In the near decade since FastHorse wrote The Thanksgiving Play, she has continually worked to update it and fold in references to current modes of thinking and theater-making. Over the pandemic, she reworked the script to take place not in a classroom but on Zoom. Keanu Reeves and Alia Shawkat performed it for a fundraiser for the Actors Fund, directed by Leigh Silverman.
This production’s director Rachel Chavkin and quartet of actors – Scott Foley, D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran and Chris Sullivan – have all been involved in crafting new jokes and pitching buzzwords to throw into the version that opens on Thursday night. “Now that we’re post the post-racial society, we can’t be blind to differences,” a character says when the group is agonizing over who they can cast in their play. “Before we were blind to race,” another chimes in with self-importance, “but now we totally see it. It’s our duty as allies.”
It’s an unsettling work, one that FastHorse engineered to leave audience members with more questions than answers. But she says she does have one main point she hopes will cut through the laughter: that a supposedly respectful hands-off approach is not adequate. “What I’ve seen is a dangerous trend in this particular world, which is the role of doing nothing,” she said. “There’s this thinking, you know, we march, but then we’re just gonna step away because it’s too complicated.” She cites a white man in charge of a theater organization who told her: “By doing nothing, we become part of the solution.” This sentiment is brought to side-splitting life in the show’s audacious climax.
FastHorse, a former professional ballet dancer, is about to be the first female Indigenous playwright to have a show on Broadway. “Native Americans have a tradition of talking about what will happen in seven generations,” she said. “I have to make sure this is a better path for the people who come after me.” She is equally invested in how her work will affect today’s generation of theater goers. “I’m a neuroscience nerd. And so a lot of what I’m doing in the way I use humor within the satire is trying to help you rewire the way your brain works,” she said. “So hopefully afterwards when you’re done with my play, your brain is still trying to figure out where to put all this.”
The Thanksgiving Play is at the Hayes Theater in New York until 4 June
