“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.”
Introducing: “In The Dark”
Chloe Bailey on Working Solo; and the Lost New Jersey Photos of Cartier-Bresson
The Russian Activist Maria Pevchikh on the Fate of Alexey Navalny, and the Future of Russia
Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; and the 2023 Brody Awards
The Pandemic at Three: Who Got it Right?
Angela Bassett on Playing Tina Turner and Queen Ramonda of Wakanda
A Year of the War in Ukraine
Martin McDonagh Talks with Patrick Radden Keefe
Chuck D on How Hip-Hop Changed the World
Salman Rushdie on Surviving the Fatwa
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Daily
Should This Exist?
Without Fail
Hannibal Buress
Longform