How ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Launched Its Trailblazing Playwright’s Very Busy Year

With the new production of her comedy “The Thanksgiving Play,” Larissa FastHorse has become the first known Native American female playwright on Broadway. Now she can cross it off her to-do list.

Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:

“I’ve had this goal for a long time,” FastHorse, a winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant,” said on “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast. “I told my agent probably 10 years ago that I wanted to be the first Native American female playwright on Broadway, because sadly we haven’t had one that we know of. I was very clear that I wanted to be that person.”

FastHorse is also the first Native American playwright on Broadway since Lynn Riggs, the writer of Cherokee descent whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” was the inspiration for “Oklahoma!” His last Broadway run was way back in 1950.

In 2019, “The Thanksgiving Play” was one of the top 10 most-produced plays in the United States — and that was no accident. On Stagecraft, FastHorse recalled hitting repeated roadblocks in getting her plays produced, and explained how that spurred her to get strategic in writing “Thanksgiving Play.”

“I hit a wall of having my plays commissioned and produced by the commissioning theater company that put money into it and development into it, and then the play would not go beyond that,” she said. “I was being told my plays were un-castable because they had Native American characters in them.”

So, FastHorse continued, she made a choice: “I said: Okay, fine, American theater. I’m going to continue to tell Indigenous contemporary issues and stories but I’m going to do it with four white-presenting people in one room. If you say you can’t produce that, then we obviously have a different conversation to have.”

Now “Thanksgiving Play,” which comically skewers white American theater makers trying (and often failing) to be sensitive to Native American issues and history, has landed on Broadway with a starry cast that includes two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran and TV veterans D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place,” “A League of Their Own”), Scott Foley (“Scandal,” “Felicity”) and Chris Sullivan (“This Is Us”). And that’s just the start of her busy 2023, which has five more of her plays on the way.

“My next five plays this year are all with Native characters,” she added. “That was something I wasn’t able to achieve before I did this play.”

Also on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” FastHorse talks about how Hollywood has changed for the better in the last 15 years; details her interactions with a helpful member of the Ku Klux Klan; and recalls some awkward interactions during rehearsals of “The Thanksgiving Play.”

“There were some talks that, I will say, ended in tears,” FastHorse admitted. “But it’s because the actors care so much and really wanted to do it right. And a couple of times we really did have actors say, ‘All right, I know, I’m being my own character right now, but I have to ask this…’”

To hear the full conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.

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