LARISSA FASTHORSE STOOD stage right and waited for her cue. Behind her, the set of The Thanksgiving Play: three white walls plastered with inspirational posters, some long brown tables and the fluorescent lights that clearly compose the average classroom — smeared and dripping with the faux blood of Native people. Before her, an audience thundering in a standing ovation. FastHorse’s name was announced, along with the title that will forever be hers: The first-known Native woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
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
