National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

profeminist:

“Playwright Larissa FastHorse is sorry for ruining your Thanksgiving. Even though she loves the holiday people associate with food and family, her satirical “The Thanksgiving Play” skewers the mythology of Pilgrims and Indians finding peace through breaking bread.

Opening Tuesday at the Geffen Playhouse, “The Thanksgiving Play” centers on a group of “woke” white thespians who struggle to devise a historically accurate and culturally sensitive elementary school pageant that celebrates both Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Month.

Since premiering last fall at New York’s Playwrights Horizons, the work has been a hit, landing among American Theatre magazine’s annual ranking of the 10 most produced plays for the 2019-2020 season. “The Thanksgiving Play” has been slated for Tampa’s Jobsite Theater, the Lyric Stage Company of Boston and Warehouse Theatre in Greenville, S.C., among others, making FastHorse the first Native American or indigenous playwright to appear on the list.

For the past 13 years, she has written plays that center the contemporary indigenous experience in the U.S. with at least one Native character. But FastHorse kept hearing from theaters that her plays were “uncastable,” even in major American cities.

So she made the strategic choice to write “The Thanksgiving Play,” which features four white or white-passing characters.”

Read the full piece here