Broadway | The Guardian: The Thanksgiving Play came into being, more or less, as a dare. When theater companies told Larissa FastHorse that her script featuring Indigenous characters What Would Crazy Horse Do? was virtually “uncastable”, she set out to write a show featuring zero actors from any minority group. In a somewhat dispiriting twist, the stunt worked. The Thanksgiving Play has become one of the most produced pieces of theater in the US.
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Reading this article was very funny to me because I wrote my college essay about my feelings towards the Thanksgiving holiday. Ever since I was probably 7 or 8 years old my feelings towards Thanksgiving have been more modernized than most. I don't usually enjoy the traditional Thanksgiving food as much as I feel like society makes you think that you should, and my parents have also felt the same way for quite some time now. ever since we all had the little Revelation about how we feel about Thanksgiving Foods, we've made it a point to make a meal that we all enjoy not because we are told by the pilgrims who came to America that we should be eating turkey but because we feel like we should be eating foods that we're thankful for and will actually enjoy. we've had things such as turkey pot pies, cheeseburger sliders and even just nachos because we feel like it's a way better usage of the meaning of the holiday and we give it more of a special feel towards the actual family.
As someone indigenous, seeing the journey this play has had is one that fills me with hope as well as disillusionment. Larissa FastHorse is an openly indigenous playwright that has written many plays that tie to indigeneity. When it came to producing these plays and putting them on stage though she encountered roadblock after roadblock. Being told over and over again that there are not enough indigenous actors to cast a play with. Completely missing the point of the making of these pieces. To be FOR indigenous people. To date, Thanksgiving play is the first play on Broadway to be written by an openly indigenous playwright. But it has no indigenous actors. Or even actors of color. This is a direct side-eye to the Great White Way. It is a script to point out the problems in the modern day liberal theatre goer’s mind. A way to point them out and say that they are not excused from being part of the problem.
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