Larissa FastHorse

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.

“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.”