Please login or sign up to post and edit reviews.
The Playwright Larissa FastHorse on “The Thanksgiving Play,” Broadway’s New Comedy of White Wokeness
Media Type |
audio
Categories Via RSS |
Arts
Books
News
News Commentary
Politics
Publication Date |
Apr 18, 2023
Episode Duration |
00:17:08

“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 episode currently has no reviews.

Submit Review
This episode could use a review!

This episode could use a review! Have anything to say about it? Share your thoughts using the button below.

Submit Review