Larissa FastHorse, a groundbreaking Lakota playwright and the first Native American woman to have a play on Broadway, discusses her thought-provoking work 'The Thanksgiving Play.' She reflects on her journey of navigating her Indigenous identity and the complexities of representing Native narratives in theater. Meanwhile, author Ayelet Waldman shares her therapeutic experience with quilting as a coping mechanism for stress, emphasizing how it brings her solace during tough times. Both guests intertwine art with personal healing in powerful ways.
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Bicultural upbringing
Larissa FastHorse, raised in a white family despite her Lakota heritage, initially felt this separation as painful.
Now, she views her bicultural upbringing as a superpower, enabling her to bridge cultural gaps.
insights INSIGHT
Ballet's Influence on Playwriting
FastHorse's ballet background instilled a strong work ethic, influencing her writing process as a playwright.
It also informs her artistic style, evident in the movement-based, text-free scenes in her plays like "The Thanksgiving Play."
question_answer ANECDOTE
Satire and Wokeness
"The Thanksgiving Play" satirizes performative wokeness, depicting white liberals trying to create a Thanksgiving play that is respectful to Native Americans.
FastHorse updated the play to reflect current discussions about race and education in the United States, ensuring the characters resonate with contemporary audiences.
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In 'A Really Good Day,' Ayelet Waldman chronicles her 30-day experiment with microdosing LSD to manage her severe mood storms. The book delves into her personal struggles with mood disorders, the history and mythology of LSD, and the current research on its therapeutic benefits. Waldman, drawing from her experiences as a federal public defender and a mother, provides a multifaceted exploration of the drug's impact on her life, her family, and the broader societal context of drug policy and mental health treatment.
“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.” This segment originally aired on April 14, 2023.
Plus, earlier this year, the author and essayist Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay for The New Yorker about taking up a new hobby. Trying to cope with intensely stressful news, Waldman dove head first into teaching herself how to quilt. “I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine. I would quilt all day and then I’d go to sleep. It wasn’t like I was checking out; I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on,” she told the producer Jeffrey Masters. “But somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands, and I decided I want to know how and why.” Waldman talked with neuroscientists about the reason that certain brain activities seem to relax us. And to her surprise, it wasn’t hard to find hours each day, in the life of a busy writer, to pursue a new vocation. “Honestly,” she admits, “I was literally spending that time on the Internet.”
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