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This was a premiere-night crowd at the Hayes Theater: a carefully curated group of industry professionals — FastHorse’s peers — all sharply dressed and primed to celebrate. And FastHorse, by virtue of being on stage, her play having completed the first performance in a two-month Broadway run, was primed for their approval. After a moment, smiling, FastHorse raised the microphone and read a message in Lakota from her cellphone. Halfway through, she paused to wipe tears from her eyes. “Sorry,” she said in English to the crowd. “My father just passed recently, and I didn’t expect to cry saying his name. He’d be so proud of me being here.”

Clapping, whistles, shouts. The moment was buoyant; joy seemed to bounce off the theater’s walls. There was history made, and, yes, a bit of compromise to make it.

IN THE FALL OF 2022, FastHorse gathered the theater staff who would be producing The Thanksgiving Play. This is something she does with every theater company she works with, including Second Stage Theater, which has focused on productions by emerging and established American playwrights since it purchased the Hayes in 2015. The group included the designers, front-of-house officials, managers, in-house production management company — everyone involved in the logistics of producing the play, except for the actors, who had not yet been cast. The day was dedicated to what FastHorse likes to call “Indian 101.”

“We spent a couple hours together doing really basic cultural competency training,” FastHorse said. The goal, she explained, was for her and the staff to locate themselves “in our journey of our knowledge of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous audiences and topics.”

The Thanksgiving Play follows four non-Native amateur theater hopefuls tasked with putting on a politically correct Thanksgiving performance for an elementary school audience. Producing this finely tuned satire — particularly within the commercial New York scene, which is short on Indigenous representation — demanded a nuanced understanding of Native issues that FastHorse knew she would have to establish.

Despite having some 15 plays under her belt, FastHorse still finds herself the first Native voice in many of the spaces she occupies. Indian 101 is designed to build community and set a standard that protects rising Indigenous artists and their communities from industry ignorance.

The time and thought she puts into these gatherings is, as she put it, “extra free labor,” delicately balanced atop the long list of a playwright’s duties to ensure that her material retains its heart and foundational intentions. In addition to advising on production and set and prop design, FastHorse worked daily through rehearsals and the run of preview shows to tweak, tighten and update the play’s dialogue. But the Indian 101 sessions reflect a piece of advice she received from an early mentor, the late, acclaimed Maori filmmaker Merata Mita. “‘Larissa, you can be an educator or you can be an artist; you cannot be both,’” FastHorse recounted. By keeping her education work behind the scenes, FastHorse frees herself on the page. Or at least that’s the idea.

“‘Larissa, you can be an educator or you can be an artist; you cannot be both.’” 

Written over the course of a 10-day residency in Ireland in 2015, The Thanksgiving Play is in many ways a rebuke of the forces that necessitate Indian 101. The show, which runs at a tight one hour and 40 minutes, lacks an intermission. Instead, a screen drops down to show four videos, written by FastHorse and directed by Rachel Chavkin, that serve as interstitials — intervening segments that depict real (and really racist) Thanksgiving lesson plans, a truly committed-to-the-bit take on “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and a rendition of “My Country ‘tis of Thee” that includes a teenage Native band member flipping the bird to Teddy Roosevelt. FastHorse’s dialogue satirizes and skewers white, liberal, do-gooder norms, constantly revealing and recontextualizing the four characters’ varying degrees of ignorance of Native experience and history, until its bloody, blindingly white finale lays bare the hopelessness of ever accomplishing a Native-less production.

Like Indian 101, The Thanksgiving Play began as a response to a common problem. FastHorse, who is 52 years old, spent more than a decade writing and working on plays that mostly focused on and cast Native people. Her work was well-reviewed at theaters, including the Kansas City Rep and AlterTheater, but her attempts to convince production companies that any of it was ripe for a wider audience — let alone a Broadway audience — always hit the same wall. Native art performed by Native artists appeared, to non-Native financiers, too risky a gambit. And so, The Thanksgiving Play was born.

“If people are saying they can’t cast Native actors — which we all know isn’t true — then here, I’m going to deal with Indigenous issues in a way that is very presentable for white-presenting actors,” FastHorse told me during a break in rehearsals this April. She sat in a velvet-covered seat in the auditorium, stagehands and theater staff buzzing around her, maintaining the frenetic rehearsal pace even during breaks. “I didn’t want to do this,” she said of the play. “I tried not to for 12 years.”

But FastHorse saw this script as her best opportunity to enter the commercial circuit. It premiered at Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre in 2017 and was immediately a hit; “Satire doesn’t get much richer than that,” a New York Times critic proclaimed in 2018. The following year, with a total of eight productions, The Thanksgiving Play was one of the nation’s most-produced plays.

All the while, the cultural landscape of television and literature — and theater, too — was shifting, ever so slightly. Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, and Seabird Island Band author Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries exploded onto bestseller and award lists in 2018. A flood of Indigenous writers followed; series like Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs broke longstanding barriers for Native television writers and actors; hell, Maori actor and filmmaker Taika Waititi did a damn land acknowledgment at the Oscars. The change has been slow, but the seven-year period between the first Berkeley reading of The Thanksgiving Play and the Deadline announcement for its Broadway premiere marked a significant change in how Native artists were allowed to write and depict themselves and their communities. Native bodies and voices no longer needed to reflect the industry-standard racist, stereotypical caricatures of the past; they could be themselves, proudly.

In mid-February, the Broadway cast for The Thanksgiving Play was unveiled, with D’Arcy Carden, Chris Sullivan, Katie Finneran and Scott Foley hired to play the leads. Finneran, a Tony-winner, was the Broadway stalwart, while Foley and Sullivan were known for film and TV, too. Carden, one of the stars of The Good Place, was making her Broadway debut.

All four actors are white, though Carden’s father is Turkish. Performing this play, particularly its Broadway premiere, with non-Native leads meant everyone had to be in on the jokes, and that everyone needed to be clear about their relationship to FastHorse’s material. (FastHorse’s usual casting notes reads, “POC who can be considered white should be considered for all characters,” however labor regulations prevented the casting agency from including that language in their casting call.)

At Chavkin’s direction and with the advice of FastHorse and associate director Jeanette Harrison, who is of Onondaga descent, the cast and creative team started the first day of rehearsal by gathering in a large circle onstage. The group smudged to begin the session. They looked each other in the face, acknowledging their existence as artists and human beings, the majority white and non-Native. “We had a lot of feelings expressed (by the) people who were digging into these things,” FastHorse said of the actors and their understudies. “It’s hard to play what’s, essentially, the ‘good’ bad guy. So we spent a lot of time (establishing) that it was always a safe space to discuss things.” She worked closely with Chavkin and Harrison to develop an approach to directing and feedback delivery that would empower both cast and crew to ask questions throughout rehearsals.

“(It’s) part of the things that, honestly, I have to do as a Native American playwright who’s almost always the first one in a space,” FastHorse said with a shrug. She let a sigh of hope drift up into the rafters.

“Honestly, I can’t wait for the day when I can just be a playwright.”

THE BURDEN OF BEING FIRST means constantly recognizing how those before you were held back. It’s acknowledging the deep-rooted colorism that dark-skinned Native artists recognize as a closed door, and white-presenting Natives recognize as a slim crack to slither through. It’s also a reminder of exactly what Native artists are allowed to say once they reach the upper echelon of any given artistic industry, particularly those that require a team of non-Native financiers to hold final say over which projects get the green light.

FastHorse’s talent as a playwright means she is able to enter ultra-exclusive rooms within already exclusive spaces that have, for the entirety of their colonial, capitalistic existence, been meticulously designed to present, on rare occasions, a specific kind of Native: someone who can speak firmly, but not too loudly; who is tan, but not too dark; “tradish,” but still, like, down with brunch on Sundays. FastHorse has seen the slivers of light and used her talent to slip through doors that she, by any reasonable measure of her skill, should have been able to kick — if not burn — down. It’s a frustrating and unfair position to put any Native artist in. But the burden of being first comes with blessings, too. It allows you, in those pockets of ovation-backed joy, to reflect on the people that lifted you up, past the limitations put on those who came before and onto those big-city stages.

“People would forget and say things around me that they would never say if they knew I was Native.”

FastHorse was 11 months old when she was adopted by a white couple, Edmund “Ed” and Rhoda Baer in Winner, South Dakota. Her birth father, a citizen of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, and her non-Native birth mother had separated, and the Baers became her Hunka — her chosen — family. When Ed took a job a hundred miles away in Pierre, Rhoda and FastHorse moved with him. Although she grew up away from her FastHorse family, she had mentors and teachers who were a regular part of her life, and she grew up proudly Lakota. And she learned the passing game. In Pierre, FastHorse learned how white people spoke about Native communities when they perceived themselves to be alone. “People would forget and say things around me that they would never say if they knew I was Native,” FastHorse said. “Then it’d be the panic, and they’d be like, ‘Oh, shit, you know — well, not you.’”

Despite her connection to both her Lakota and adopted families, FastHorse, an only child, felt a sense of isolation that she channeled into writing. She enjoyed crafting conversations between real or imagined characters. “I was writing scenes already,” she said. “I just didn’t know that’s what they were.”

FastHorse worked as a professional ballet dancer for a decade, performing Balanchine for companies in Atlanta and Los Angeles. After her dance career ended, she worked her way into a paid internship at Universal Pictures, citing experience at a nonexistent Santa Monica film school she made up. But what began as a stab at television writing quickly shifted to the stage. “This was 15 years ago in Hollywood,” she reminded me. “The representation of Indigenous peoples was constantly being watered down; the casting was: Anyone brown was fine.”

In theater, she discovered the sense of agency that Hollywood had denied her. Unlike screenplays, the plays she wrote were not the proprietary assets of film studios; instead, hers, and hers alone, to license as she saw fit. She was able to hire language consultants and commission Native artists like Bobby Wilson (Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota) to produce lobby artwork that would set the tone for audiences as they entered the theater. She was able to contribute to, and eventually create, Native-driven and -staffed productions, designed for audiences of all backgrounds. “Coming from the ballet world,” FastHorse said, “I was like, ‘This is dancers with furniture, I can do this. I get it.’”

FastHorse’s scripts often reflect an ongoing exploration of the dynamics within intergenerational households and the many ways in which community can be defined, and she’s taken care to build these values into their subsequent creation and performance. As FastHorse began to rack up some of the world’s most prestigious fellowships and residencies and appear on annual best-of lists, she developed a partnership with Cornerstone Theater Company and director Michael John Garcés, for what would become a trilogy of plays entirely developed, written and produced with local Native communities. The first production, Urban Rez, was set and staged in Los Angeles and tackled the issue of federal recognition, while the second, Native Nation, was hosted by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and developed in partnership with tribal communities in and around Phoenix. The third, Wicoun, was set closer to home, with performances in Rapid City and other locations in South Dakota, in late May through mid-June — several weeks after her Broadway premiere.

FastHorse has built a career by acknowledging and exploring the universal experience of awkwardness that can exist between siblings and elders and partners. At the same time, she addressed larger existential questions of belonging, of found-and-curated communities and the lasting emotional impact of paternalism, whether by a loved one or a federal government.

One of her boldest plays, What Would Crazy Horse Do?, occupies the narrow space between black comedy and harrowing drama. The script tells the story of twins Journey and Calvin, who, as the last two surviving members of the fictional Marahotah Tribe, are approached by the Ku Klux Klan with a peculiar offer. The Klan sees the demise of the Marahotah as a perfect symbol: A tribe on the brink of extinction because of the ignoble effects of race-mixing and integration. The precise deployment of humor in the play is required for its high-wire act to pay off. (The twins constantly remind one another of their moribund “womb to tomb,” suicide pact.) But it is unabashedly a Native production. Early in the play, scoffing at the possibility of other Marahotah descendants, Journey cracks, “The only ones that may be left are so mixed they wouldn’t even call themselves Cherokee.”

As I pored over Calvin’s concluding monologue and the play built up to his sister’s decision, in the final scene, to don regalia embroidered with the Klan flag, I found myself muttering, So, this is what it’s like when a Native writer feels unbound.

THE THANKSGIVING PLAY is not unbound.

It is still pretty funny. Sullivan, who plays history teacher and wannabe-playwright Caden, is honored when he’s named dramaturg, “the holy grail of American theater titles.” D’Arcy Carden’s character, Alicia, inquires, “What is that?” to which Caden replies, in a hushed, mysterious whisper: “No one knows.” And the pairing of Finneran and Foley, who depict a seemingly frictionless, granola-ass couple, nail both the physical comedy and the barbs — “and the sex is so … bizarre!” Finneran, as Logan, shouts, finally unleashing on her tantric-style boyfriend, to a wave of laughter.

For the first hour, the show is funny in a way that feels familiar, now that sending up white liberals is already something of a cottage industry in the entertainment and comedy worlds. It crisply delivers on the satire of purported Indigenous allies, and the four leads nail every savory line. But the mechanism FastHorse employs to subvert the audience’s expectations is where compromise again rears its head.

Roughly halfway through the show, Jaxton and Caden exit to gather materials for a battle sequence commemorating the Pequot Massacre of 1637 — during the massacre, several dozen Mohegan and Narragansett citizens joined with the English to participate in the slaughter of Pequot families. The pair re-enter the classroom and perform their scene, in which, with full Highlander cosplay and fog machines, they empty a bag filled with blood-soaked, realistic Pequot mannequin heads onto the stage. The two men and Alicia then kick the heads around, toss them back and forth and roll them on the floor. Alicia smears bloody handprints on the back wall, while Jaxton and Caden complete their speeches and spread more blood about the stage, all to the horrified shock of Logan.

“You tell stories differently when it’s your nation, your blood memory. Everything is more weighted.”

This moment, as directed and depicted onstage, is both intensely disturbing and darkly, darkly absurd — both layered and abruptly straightforward. At the two performances I attended, the scene was met at first with groans and a handful of gasps, and then, eventually, a smattering of laughter.

For Chavkin and scenic designer Riccardo Hernández, this was more or less the desired effect. Using the touchstones of The Shining and Cabin in the Woods, they’d played around in early-stage rehearsals with dark-red lighting cues, and, at one point, they even tried what Chavkin described as “this creepy-ass tilt” with the classroom set’s ceiling. The idea was to create a tunnel effect, “almost sucking the audience and the actors in,” Hernández said. But ultimately, Chavkin — crediting a note from FastHorse — decided that pulling the focus away from the actors (and the Pequot heads) would have been distracting. Making the collective call to leave the soft white lighting and the level ceiling, staying in the confines of the classroom, was the kind of decision that “takes trust,” Hernández said. “Trust and instinct.”

It’s an effective scene — for the intended audience. Because, for a Broadway audience or a non-Native audience or even a non-Northeastern Native audience, the heads they see being kicked and rolled around aren’t Pequot heads. Instead, they’re symbolic, an amalgamation that doesn’t represent a specific trauma, but rather the broader consequences of the violence of European- and American-caused genocide — that, and the fact that the lingering impacts of this violent history have not been fully absorbed by today’s artists.

But, as the playwright Madeline Sayet reminded me, “You tell stories differently when it’s your nation, your blood memory. Everything is more weighted.”

Sayet is a citizen of the Mohegan Tribe, a clinical assistant professor at Arizona State University (where FastHorse also teaches), and the executive director of the Indigenous Performing Arts Program at Yale University. Sayet is also a playwright, director and performer, and she recently toured her one-person play, Where We Belong, in which she engages with the division created by colonization and the different expectations of war, including the generational harm caused by the Pequot Massacre.

New York, she told me, is not an easy place to be a Native person in theater. There is community and progress and beautiful art all happening on stage, but the city’s commercial scene feels sometimes stuck in a constant game of catch-up. It’s a conflicting space, both the pinnacle of the industry and a constant reminder of incrementalism, particularly for those from the region.

Sayet thought back to Broadway’s long history of pillaging Northeastern Native stories, citing the 1829 premiere of John Augustus Stone’s Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, at Park Theater, which helped popularize redface in the New York theater scene and historicize the region’s Indigenous population. This thread connects to the slow pace the modern Broadway scene has assumed when it comes to providing true support for Native artists — that FastHorse bears the burden of this particular first in 20-damn-23 is as much a condemnation of the whole operation as it is a hint of what it could yet still be.

Set against the Broadway backdrop, a Lakota-written, white-cast and -directed play that hinges on the punting of Pequot heads is a tricky operation to pull off, particularly when the audience is unlikely to be mostly Native. And the more I teased out the questions that rushed through my head the two times I watched this scene — does this work? Who is this for? What does it mean to mix my silence with others’ laughter? — the more I felt myself coming back to a note Sayet gave me as she reflected on her own play.

“I kept being told it was going to ‘do’ something, and I think for some audiences, I think it did — ultimately, it was at least a Native person telling a Native story,” she said. “But I still wonder, ‘Why that story? Why’d they pick that one?’ Is it because they want to see Native people suffer? Like, ‘How did they get me alone?’ I feel like we ask all these questions because we know that they’re not willing to go all the way at once and so there’s this thing that’s immediately in our minds of like, ‘What have we given into?’”

There is still a perceived gap, real or not, between the amount of Indigenous honesty that the moneybag-holders in American theater believe an audience can handle, and more to the point, what they will shell out cash to be entertained by.

Tara Moses, a citizen of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Mvskoke and a widely produced playwright and director, described this self-imposed sense of risk as stemming from the insecurity built into the commercial theater scene, in New York and beyond. “It’s not just about having us as marginalized people be showcased for the first time, like other marginalized identities,” Moses said. “It’s that our sheer existence is political, full stop.”

FastHorse is forthright about why she wrote The Thanksgiving Play, and she has no regrets, not about the heads or the play’s non-Native director. For her, the play represents both external limitation and possibility: A foot in the door that allows her to wave through the coming generations of Indigenous playwrights, actors and directors.

“Because I did (The Thanksgiving Play) and it’s on Broadway, now my next five plays this year all have Native characters. I couldn’t get that before,” she said. “This play means I’ve got five plays of Native actors that are going to be employed the rest of this year and for all of next year, and three more plays after that, that are already set up.”

This is the compromise that The Thanksgiving Play represents. For better and for worse, it is a Trojan horse of Native art. On the other side of the gate: Wicoun.

“It’s that our sheer existence is political, full stop.”

FASTHORSE STOOD on a different stage now, 1,700 miles away from the Hayes Theater. Once again, there were tears in her eyes.

She was in the Black Hills, creating  new stories in what, for her people, is the place of their origin. The play — titled Wicoun and performed in Lakota, Dakota and English by an all-Native cast balanced with local and out-of-town actors — focuses on a Lakota teen, Áya, and their brother, Kȟoškálaka, as the pair navigate their zombie-filled homelands after they summoned a superhero. (FastHorse’s team also put on a second play, for Lakota youth, titled Learning Wolakota.) There was still compromise involved: The rehearsals were held at Placerville Camp, a Christian retreat center, a series of cabins and communal spaces at a former gold-mining outpost that the Wicoun team rented to polish their production. One of the rehearsal spaces, for Learning Wolakota, was a chapel. A cross loomed in the sanctuary above the actors; through the windows behind it, you could see the Black Hills, and all the reminders of home and colonization that come with them.

For days, the Wicoun cast had been running lines, going through staging, running it again and again, FastHorse always quick to huddle with her actors and with Garcés, until each subtlety felt just right — not for a Broadway audience, or for the financiers, or for anyone but the Native communities the play had been created with and for.

But, during a quick break, the playwright’s tears welled. The nominees for the Tony Awards had just been announced, and The Thanksgiving Play was not among them.

On her phone, FastHorse read a New York Times article on the surprises and snubs of the awards that year. Speaking of her play, the critic said: “It is also a parable of Native American erasure, which makes the exclusion disconcerting.” She showed the article to Kumeyaay actor Kenny Ramos and let her tears fall. She took another breath and then another and picked her head up.

“From the top!”   

Nick Martin is a senior editor for HCN’s Indigenous Affairs desk and a member of the Sappony Tribe of North Carolina. We welcome reader letters. Email him at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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