Satire is one of the American theater’s greatest tools. At its best, the genre is both an effective pedagogical tool for change and a sharply-aimed weapon for critical analysis. Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” only grazes both marks. Her dizzying spiral of a comedy, the first production of a work written by a Native American woman on Broadway, follows a group of four equally inane white people devising a high school theater piece about the origins of Thanksgiving. The irony of this group’s homogenous racial makeup is not lost on anyone, especially them. FastHorse’s attempt to have her characters bounce between extreme political correctness and overt ignorance results in a muddled theatrical experience that is not quite hilarious, not quite provocative and not quite informative, but has the aftertaste of all three. 

Surprisingly, “The Thanksgiving Play” does not begin with an Indigenous land acknowledgement. There is a short one scribbled in the show’s program, but one would think Logan — the play’s uber-progressive protagonist desperate to prove her white allyship — would require one. 

Logan is the high school drama teacher — riddled with nervous tics by standout actor Katie Finneran — directing the high school’s new, socially-conscious ode to Native American Heritage Month. It’s “far more than a Thanksgiving play” now that Logan has received a lineup of grants from race and equity justice organizations. Her partner in love, absurdity and awful, matching thrift-store scarves (simple costume design by Lux Haac) is Jaxton (Scott Foley). Never one to miss a predictable stereotype about white well-doers, FastHorse prescribes him to be a farmer’s market performer and a Buddhist yogi. And great news: Logan’s hired Native American actor Alicia (D’Arcy Carden) to join them. But we soon learn Alicia is not Native, she simply relies on ethnic-looking headshots to blur the lines. Though crushing to Logan and Jaxton, resident historian and aspiring playwright Caden (Chris Sullivan) is desperate to work with “professionals” and, therefore, less bothered by this.  

The quartet drones on about scene work once they realize that no Natives are present — an eerie metaphor for the erasure of Native bodies, voices and art across this entire nation. Should they represent people who are not present? 

FastHorse’s script takes annular laps to answer this impossible question, while interspersing sobering historical facts about the origins of Thanksgiving. But without fail, the ensemble’s nonsensical rambles about privilege swallow those harsh truths. Making a mockery of woke culture is an interesting foundation for a play, but FastHorse — who truly is one of our industry’s strongest champions of inclusion and has radically opened doors for Native people in the arts — is poking at race relationships here, where she ought to be stabbing. You feel the play inching towards greater implications about cultural genocide, but opting out — as if no one in the audience should sit too long with the reality of tragedy before hearing a joke about mason jars and soy cheese. 

Of course, no playwright, especially a non-white playwright, should have to wade in trauma if they don’t choose to, but I found myself longing for even a glimmer of FastHorse’s own disappointment, advice — even rage — to underscore all the derision. 

“The Thanksgiving Play” and all of its players are almost too aware of the jokes they are telling, so no aspect of the play feels real. Director Rachel Chavkin makes sure that Carden plays dumb. Foley plays hyper-diplomacy. Finneran plays earnestness. Sulllivan plays desperation. None are being human. And while that lack of depth is an example of FastHorse’s critique, it is also the source of my disinterest. 

What is interesting, however, is designer Riccardo Hernandez’s nostalgic delight of a classroom set adorned with a sprawling world map, cherubic headshots of students bordering the walls and a cluttered teacher’s desk with one of those old-school pencil sharpeners you have to crank by hand. My favorite detail is a poster on the back wall of “The Shipment” — an unsettling play, co-written by Young Jean Lee and her cast of five Black performers that challenges racial biases about Black people. Like FastHorse, Lee is a “first.” After decades of self-producing avant-garde work, Lee became the first female Asian American playwright on Broadway with “Straight White Men,” another satire produced by Second Stage featuring an all-white cast debating privilege. It hardly felt coincidental and, sure enough, when I looked back at FastHorse’s script, she mandates use of that poster in her stage directions. 

Like “Straight White Men,” “The Thanksgiving Play” feels like a reactionary work, a play that takes aim at an industry more willing to champion ideas about artists of color than artists of color themselves. FastHorse deserves more. Because she knows better than anyone that Native artists are here and ready to work. Just not in this play. 

“The Thanksgiving Play” opened at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater on April 20, 2023.

Review photo by Joan Marcus.

Creative: Written by Larissa FastHorse; Directed by Rachel Chavkin; Scenic design by Riccardo Hernández; Costume design by Lux Haac; Lighting design by Jeanette Oui-Suk Yew; Sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman; Projection and video design by David Bengali; Hair and makeup design by Brittany Hartman; Production stage management by John C. Moore; Casting by The Telsey Office, Will Cantler and Karyn Casl.

Produced by Second Stage Theater under artistic director Carole Rothman and interim executive director Lisa Lawer Post. 

Cast: D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley, Chris Sullivan, Clea Alsip, Christopher Ryan Grant and Amy Staats with film appearances by Ishan De Silva, Mollie Fink, Atticus Scott-Williamson and Dasan Turner.

#inform-video-player-1 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }

#inform-video-player-2 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }

TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma – Indigenous artists of the past, and today’s artists, are helping mold the future, an expert on curating artwork told an audience during a recent event in the capital city of the country’s largest Native tribe.

Dr. Miranda Belarde-Lewis, assistant professor at the University of Washington and a curator, spoke during the 50th annual Symposium on the American Indian at Northeastern University.

“Relationality is something we have latched onto, how native communities continue to make our systems of knowledge visible,” she said.

Tribal relationships with the land, water, ceremonies and stories are the nouns in the vocabulary she used, resulting in the objects people can see in museums. The verbs are people’s actions — how indigenous people deliberately engage with the world, through their people, places and ideas. Proper curating of art work is imperative in reflecting indigenous people’s culture now and helping it create change in the future.

Belarde-Lewis showed the photo of a robe created by an artist in Sitka, AK. A school of herring, depicted in gold, swim across a burgundy background. The fish are plentiful on the back of the road, diminishing to a narrow group of fish and finally a single fish as they approach the wearer’s neck.

The robe was created to protest the path to extinction facing the herring because of overfishing.

“Commercial fishing — they just scoop up everything in their nets,” Belarde-Lewis said. “This is showing how the herring would swim everywhere, but now they are getting channel into this little area.”

The fish population has been depleted because of man’s activities — including pollution and overfishing. The robe depicts the situation in an effort to depict this depletion and encourage change.

Belarde-Lewis praised the work of several artists, including Cherokees Roy Boney Jr. and Jane Osti.

Boney has the skill to say things creatively on a regular basis with meaning in his Daily Sketches.

“Colonization is a system because it works every day. It doesn’t take a day off,” she said.

Osti, a renowned potter, creates clay vessels and paddles “showing how long our systems of technology are unique to us.” The pottery isn’t necessarily flashy but it depicts tradition and objects that have been useful to Cherokee cooks for centuries.

“All the people who Jane has worked with, who Jane is mentoring, they will continue that technology,” Belarde-Lewis said.

She also spoke of artist collectives, saying they were working toward a future where all indigenous creatures can thrive side by side.

Some people are put off by believing art musicians are snobby institutions not relevant to most people. But curating according to Belarde-Lewis’ philosophy encourages communication and discussing art as it is socially relevant.

“Sometimes it’s as simple as pulling up a chair and talking to people,” she said.

Among the contemporary curators she praised was America Meredith, a Cherokee and editor of First American Art magazine.

She and other renowned curators have the wealth of experience needed for cultural preservation, Belarde-Lewis said. They can walk into a gallery and tell if something just isn’t right. They can work correct the exhibit, to make it convey the message needed in today’s society.

“The artists are leading the way. The curators are holding it and the curators are presenting their work to our people and the world,” she said.

She quoted Dr. Jolene Rickard on how curating tribal art relates to sovereignty: “Sovereignty is the border that shifts indigenous experience from a victimized stance to a strategic one. The recognition of this puts brains in our heads and muscle in our bones.”

The curator’s knowledge and discretion are imperative, Belarde-Lewis said.

“The artists are leading the way. The curators are holding it and the curators are presenting their work to our people and the world,” she said.

“There are a lot of things that are out of our control, but our choices are our own.”

#inform-video-player-3 .inform-embed { margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px; }

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — From doo-wop musicians to Broadway legends and beyond, iconic artists that have made their mark in Philadelphia were honored on Thursday with a special tribute.

Their plaques were unveiled on the Philadelphia Walk of Fame on Broad Street.

“I’m happy to have this honor because it’s a long time coming,” said Norman E. Burnett with The Tymes.

The Tymes, a doo-wop group from the 50s, was among the inductees.

Also honored with a plaque were former Governer Ed Rendell, The Bacon Brothers, James DePreist, radio host John DiBella, and Patty Jackson, among others.

“To be on this walk with so many greats, and to be the first woman in radio, because I stand on the backs of many great women,” said Jackson, WDAS-FM radio host. “I am overjoyed.”

Jackson told 6abc she’s currently writing a book about her life in radio, empowering others, and overcoming a major health scare.

“Eight years ago I suffered a stroke. I lost my vision, I couldn’t walk, but I never lost my ability to talk, and getting back on my feet made me even more grateful,” she said.

Leslie Odom Jr., a Philadelphia native and a breakout star in Broadway’s hit show ‘Hamilton’, was also honored with a plaque.

SEE ALSO: East Oak Lane’s Leslie Odom Jr. among ‘Walk of Fame’ inductees

“I was already coming for Patty and then they added me to the list, and I was like ‘Amazing!'” he said.

The Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award-winner had a message for Philadelphia’s youth.

“Allow the resources of this city to support you as they’ve supported me. You can go as far as you dream,” said Odom.

When Larissa FastHorse was growing up in South Dakota, she was taught that Thanksgiving was a time for harvest and gratitude. The inaccurate portrayal of happy pilgrims and Indians that many students learn today was never part of story.

It’s part of the reason why FastHorse, 51, decided to write the satirical comedy “The Thanksgiving Play,” which tells the story of four woke, white theater makers who are writing a Thanksgiving play for students to perform. The liberal, well-meaning artists worry so much about not offending anyone and getting the story historically right, that things go very wrong.

“[Growing up], I was aware that there was an Indigenous truth being left out of Thanksgiving, but even I was not fully aware of how fictionalized the national holiday story is until I did research from the play,” said FastHorse.

With the play’s opening this week, FastHorse is making history as the first Native American woman to bring a show on Broadway. It’s being directed by Tony Award-winning director Rachel Chavkin and stars Katie Finneran, Scott Foley, Chris Sullivan and D’Arcy Carden.

FastHorse recently chatted with Know Your Value about her new play, the importance of representation, her career pivot from ballet dancer to playwright and more. Below is the conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Know Your Value: You grew up in South Dakota. What are your memories of Thanksgiving during your childhood, and how did it influence the story you tell in “The Thanksgiving Play”?

Larissa FastHorse: The play is based in a classroom. My childhood classroom experiences with Thanksgiving was not like the play. My experience was [that Thanksgiving is] entirely a harvest festival. The way Thanksgiving is taught in schools with plays and pageants depicting pilgrims and Indians was completely new to me. It’s been really big for me to realize what we have kids to learn about Thanksgiving, because my in my world, Thanksgiving is just about harvest, gratitude and thankfulness.

Know Your Value: You have gotten a lot of attention for being the first Native American woman to bring a show on Broadway. What does that honor mean to you?

FastHorse: It’s huge. I go back and forth between being so excited and honored, and then feeling like a lot of pressure. The last Native American playwright that we know of was Lynn Riggs, and it was nearly 100 years ago. It’s taken a whole new century for us to have another Native American playwright… me. I do not want that to happen again. I have a lot of pressure to make sure things go well so that it isn’t another century before we have the many, many incredible Native writers we should have on Broadway.

Know Your Value: Tell us about the genesis of the play — and how you decided to weave a lot of humor into a story about America’s dark history.

FastHorse: I’m a comedy writer. Comedy is also in Native American culture. We say, “you have to laugh or cry,” so we choose to laugh … We deal with the dark history with humor and that’s how we persevere and we survive. Using comedy is natural for me, and it’s the indigenous way to deal with things.

Know Your Value: The play is being directed by Rachel Chavkin, best known as the Tony Award winning director of “Hadestown.” On the surface, this may seem like an unlikely pairing. Tell us about this decision and how you two decided to collaborate.

FastHorse: Rachel Chavkin and I have known each other for 10 years, at least. We always have admired each other’s work but this is the first project we’ve been able to work on together. Her sense of theatricality is incredible. She can take something very simple and make it large and beautiful and inviting. And she’s hilarious. She’s also our … secret weapon of understanding well-meaning, liberal white people. She does that role well for us because everyone else on the creative team is a person of color.

Aug. 5, 201905:06

Know Your Value: What do you hope viewers take away from the play— and America’s painful history of how they treated Native Americans?

FastHorse: First and foremost, I hope people have fun and can enjoy being together in the theater, at the play, as a comedy within a satire. But then I think also it should leave people asking themselves about what they were and were not taught: Why wasn’t I taught these things? Why didn’t I learn different history? Why is it so hard to find history about indigenous people and the lands we’re standing on? I want people to start to really question why Native American history is taught how it is, why there’s an access or lack of access to certain information, and why we haven’t sorted it out sooner and started to do better.

Know Your Value: Let’s talk about career pivots. You began your career as a ballet dancer and choreographer but left that dream behind when you were forced into early retirement due to an injury. What was the pivot to playwright like?

FastHorse: A career pivot is really hard… Suddenly you have to let go of what you know (in my case dancing) and find out what to do with the rest of your life. I was fortunate and found an organization called Career Transitions for Dancers. They give career counseling, training and education to the dancers both during and after their career to figure out what to do next. I really needed that at that time. They helped get me into writing.

I worked in film and TV writing first, 15 years ago. At the time, I was really disappointed in how Hollywood was depicting Native people and Native stories. It just wasn’t accurate, and I felt like I was fighting all the time to share true Native stories. Eventually theater found me through the Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program. I really was excited about how theater wanted to do things right with storytelling. I’m now back in film and TV because things have changed in the past 15 years. And now, theater, film and TV are trying to do things right as

Painterly drips draw us into the monumental canvas, navigating our gaze across the map embellished with newspaper clips of ads promoting a community bank and gas-guzzling cars, comic strips, and messages of border Imperialism. The play of textures – two panels of oil, paper, newspaper, and fabric on canvas – enhance our experience wrangling the complex narrative of Indigenous identity and life in the United States.

Indian Map (1992) is among more than 130 provocative works revealing the depth and breadth of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s oeuvre as part of Memory Map, the artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective and the first showcasing an Indigenous artist organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Smith, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana, takes us on an emotional voyage spanning Abstraction, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism, telling stories through her singular visual language punctuated with recurring imagery of flags, horses, bison, and canoes, and told with repurposed materials such as newspaper, fabric, and commercial objects. We can’t ignore her calls for awareness and action to address ecological devastation, historical lies, racisim, Imperialism, and the genocide of Native Americans, without alienating or offending her audience.

“Smith is not only a monumental artist but also a mentor, exemplar, and powerful influence to younger generations of Native American artists. She has brought exposure and offered encouragement to hundreds of Indigenous artists over her career. This exhibition encourages us to look at Smith and her peers anew, to be mindful of our prejudices, and to be vigilant and self-critical in our use of art historical labels and frameworks in our work moving forward,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, who plans to step down at the end of his current contract, on October 31. Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s current Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, will become the director on November 1, building on Weinberg’s three decades of high-level leadership positions at the museum.

Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who organized the exhibition with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant, said “Learning from Jaune has been a perspective-shifting experience, and it is thrilling to have the opportunity to share her life’s work with our audiences at the Whitney.”

Installed thematically across the Whitney’s third and fifth floors, the exhibition opened yesterday alongside Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century on the fifth and eight floors, which delves deep into how climate change, automation, contagion, and politics shape work and life in twenty-first century America.

The simultaneous openings, featuring two distinctive artists, shock, empower, amuse, and enlighten us, rewriting art history from two revolutionary perspectives. We can’t look away from these visceral works which expose the injustices of everyday life in the U.S. Both shows are on view through August 13, offering a wide array of content in context that debunks myths and amplifies Others. Both artists present a broad range of powerful works across mediums and subjects that compel us to reconsider our preconceived notions, forcing us into uncomfortable dialogues that are too easily avoided in everyday life.

Kline’s Blue Collars (2014–2020) series of stand-alone sculptural portraits and video interviews of working people in the U.S. is especially disturbing and engrossing. Inspired by the Great Recession that lingered from late 2007 through 2009, Kline began investigating how folks without college degrees endure dehumanizing labor and service jobs that fail to provide a living wage.

Kline paid delivery people, restaurant servers, and hotel room cleaners for 3D scans of their heads, arms, and legs, so he could create full-color 3D-printed sculptures that will make your skin crawl. The same workers are interviewed on video about their jobs, ambitions, political views, and their feelings about life in general.

“Josh Kline has had the uncanny ability to hone in on the most important issues of the day and create art that is disturbingly urgent,” said Weinberg. “Watching the magnetic attraction of viewers to his work is astonishing: they are simultaneously enraptured, bewildered, and repulsed. Kline’s art is radical, uncompromising, and looks unblinkingly at the possible future.”

Christopher Y. Lew, former Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney and current Chief Artistic Director at the Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art, who organized the exhibition with McClain Groff, Curatorial Project Assistant, said “It has been thrilling to follow his practice over more than a decade and it’s a great privilege to organize his major mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art.”

Human precarity, whether it’s through slaughter and mistreatment of native peoples on their land or from not being able to pay rent or buy groceries, is too often dismissed. Smith and Kline don’t let us walk away ignorant. It’s only through such visceral or emotional art that we begin to learn empathy and identify with the marginalized, seeing ourselves in Others. Art isn’t always pretty pictures. The Whitney takes a brave stance by presenting two artists who make us confront the horrors of everyday life for too many people in the U.S. This is American art. This is highly-charged art that pushes us beyond our comfort zone in order to broaden our understanding of how Others live and how we fit into the big picture of human existence.

“The oldest art museum in New York was inaugurated sometime in the late 1800s, 150 years ago, and there are younger art museums approximately 90 years old, yet I am the first Native woman to have a major retrospective in New York City,” said Smith. “The Whitney has jumped off the cliff and shattered the status quo. Hallelujah for them making this risky move. For what is the risk worth? It offers us more Native artists, the Nation’s First Peoples, our Original Peoples, to become part of the mainstream art world. I am deeply grateful to the Whitney, as well as Garth Greenan Gallery, for their kind, supportive, diligent work over four years. We are making history; we are plowing new ground; we are opening a staid, closed, colonial door.”

Kline has lived and worked in New York for more than two decades, reacting to national and global events as a New Yorker, yet his work has rarely been displayed in the city.

“It means so much to show this work in the city where it was conceived, at this time, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art,” said Kline. “I can’t wait to bring it all home to NYC and to have a very intense conversation with the public about America’s past, present, and future.”

When Joshua Emerson’s mom died in the winter of 2019, he felt like a crucial part of himself had been severed. The Denver-based comedian, writer and actor was raised partly on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, and his mother’s passing sparked a difficult reckoning with his Native heritage. 

“There’s a sense that I lost a little of my Indigenousness when she died, because she was the one that was Navajo, and was from the reservation, and she spoke Navajo,” says Emerson, whose dad is white. “I don’t speak Navajo. There’s a sense that I have to learn how to come back to that as an adult … I feel orphaned culturally, and because of that, it’s made me want to do Native projects and be around Native people.”

Now 31, Emerson is co-chair of the Denver American Indian Commission, and puts on one of the only Native comedy showcases in the United States. He also just became managing director of Creative Nations Collective, a permanent onsite gallery for Indigenous artists at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder. 

Emerson stays busy these days, performing comedy and helping various communities blossom — from the Colorado indie-comic circle to the world of local Indigenous artists. He’s also the co-founder of DeadRoom Comedy in Denver, a troupe and production company he started with friends Elliot Weber and Jacob Jonas after graduating from Fort Lewis College in Durango four years ago.  

Hosting nearly 200 events since its inception, including the Colorado Native comedy showcase, DeadRoom has become the perfect vehicle to combine Emerson’s industrious ambition with his passion for Indigenous issues. He sees comedy as a vehicle for Native people of various tribal backgrounds to connect and learn from each other.

“Comedy is unique in that it’s able to give voice to minority communities,” he says. “It helps us talk about difficult things and then relieve it through a punchline that just makes everybody laugh and brings [them] into community. When you can talk about difficult things, you’re able to be more honest.”

‘You don’t know what’s funny until you try it’

With that uplift and honesty in mind, Emerson stresses that “Native Americans are not a monolith.” As the only Indigenous member of DeadRoom, which has expanded from its three founding members, he wants folks to know that understanding Native people takes more than catching up on the latest season of Reservation Dogs.

“When you’re talking to a Native you gotta ask, ‘So what tribe or community are you from?’ They [each] have their own history and backstory,” he says. “There’s a big difference between being Ojibwe and being Navajo — being Diné, which is what I am. But it’s cool; we have similar struggles; we see each other. There’s definitely, like, a head nod. There’s a community [that comes] from being Native.”

DeadRoom is now putting on roughly a dozen comedy events a month, according to Emerson, stretching across Colorado and into surrounding states. And as the collective’s footprint grows, Emerson waxes poignantly when asked whether there is any subject that shouldn’t be joked about.

“If you’re going to talk about something that’s going to bring up trauma in people, you gotta have an exit for it,” he explains. “Are you being irresponsible by making jokes that are gonna hurt people? And then there’s this other thing of, you don’t know what’s funny until you try it. So the attempt becomes sacred.”

When it comes to that “sacred” attempt, Emerson says there are few crowds tougher than those found here in Boulder. 

“I’d say Boulder is one of the hardest places to talk about race … even [harder than] Colorado Springs or Fort Collins. When you’re talking about race in those communities, their racism is out in the open, and they’re OK laughing about it,” he says. “You come up to Boulder, I think there’s less racism but the racism that is here is very inside — very hidden — and it’s very hard to reach. When you do bring it up it makes people uncomfortable, because they’ve compartmentalized it. It’s hard for them to find the funny in it. I don’t know if it’s that they’re ashamed, or if they’re aware they even have it stored away.”

But as Emerson continues to push audiences into uncomfortable territory while working to ensure “a seat at the table” for Native people through various organizations and events, the self-described comedy “lifer” returns to a simple but profound goal. 

“The best you can do is try to make it better, and hope that creates a lineage so that it’s easier for anyone that comes behind you.” 

ON STAGE: Underground Comedy Showcase feat. Joshua Emerson and Ben Roy. 7:30 p.m. April 27-29, License No. 1, 2115 13th St., Boulder. Tickets here.