“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.”
Jonathan Blitzer on the Battle over Immigration; and Olivia Rodrigo Talks with David Remnick
From In the Dark: The Runaway Princesses
For Journalists, “Gaza Is Unprecedented,” and Deadly
The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is so “Fertile” for Comedy
Pramila Jayapal: Biden’s “Coalition Has Fractured”
E. Jean Carroll on Trump Defamation Cases: “Money Is Precious to Him”
Danielle Brooks Comes Full Circle in “The Color Purple”
How Donald Trump Broke the Iowa Caucuses and Owns the G.O.P.
From “Talk Easy”: Sam Fragoso Interviews David Remnick
Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film “Origin” to Influence the 2024 Election
How the Journalist John Nichols Became Another January 6th Conspiracy-Theory Target
The Poet John Lee Clark’s “How to Communicate” Brings DeafBlind Experience to the Page
Dexter Filkins Reports on the Border Crisis
From Critics at Large: The Year of the Doll
Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving
Christmas in Tehran: Bringing the Holidays to Hostages
A Harrowing Detention in Gaza
Brandy Clark: Grammy-Nominated Album Is “Authentically Me”
Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted
How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Daily
Should This Exist?
Without Fail
Hannibal Buress
Longform