The Thanksgiving Play may leave you with more questions than answers, but Larissa FastHorse promises you’ll also laugh a lot | Canada Voices

Larissa FastHorse never imagined that some of her most frustrating professional experiences would serve as inspiration for the script that would change her life.

An Indigenous playwright from South Dakota, FastHorse has spent decades working in the predominantly white theatre world, often coming up against well-intended yet ignorant colleagues and peers. After years of feeling defeated by reputable theatres’ refusal to mount her productions with Indigenous actors in lead roles, she decided to try a different approach.

“We’ve always had incredibly talented Native actors and artists, but the perception was that we didn’t,” FastHorse says over Zoom. “So I said ‘Fine, I will deal with the same issues, but I’ll do it with white presenting artists.’”

The result is The Thanksgiving Play, which premiered on Broadway in 2023, turning FastHorse into the first known female Indigenous playwright to be produced on Broadway, and it has since become one of the most-produced plays across North America. The show had its Canadian premiere at Toronto’s CAA Theatre on Sept. 27.

The piece is a kind of “comedy within a satire,” as FastHorse calls it. It depicts two teachers and two theatre professionals – all of whom are white – trying desperately to create a politically correct show about U.S. Thanksgiving yet failing miserably to be even half as progressive as they intend. The play focuses heavily on the concept of intention versus impact with the goal of teaching audiences that intending to be respectful doesn’t always yield the desired results.

FastHorse says the only way for all individuals to feel safe and valued is for people to look at the effect of their actions and own up to them, even if their intentions were pure.

While the play openly pokes fun at well-meaning but tone-deaf white folks, it has resonated widely with that audience. FastHorse believes that’s because the play is less about placing blame and more about educating a demographic that does want to learn and do better.

“It’s my way of saying, ‘I appreciate all the wonderful supporters who come to the theatre who are still predominantly white, but you’ve also got a ways to go,’” she says. “I have trust in them that they want to do better and they want to approach Indigenous people differently.”

And it certainly helps that her message is communicated through humour, which FastHorse describes as both her personal love language and that of many Indigenous cultures. “You know you’re in with Native and Indigenous folks if they’re making fun of you,” she says.

Although humour has historically been an effective way to help audiences swallow more serious underlying themes, the reach and success of The Thanksgiving Play has gone beyond anything FastHorse could have imagined. There have been roughly 300 independent productions around the world, a number the playwright finds truly “unbelievable.”

She’s also had audience members write to her on social media to tell her they’ve begun a tradition of reading the play as a family at Thanksgiving dinner each year.

High school drama teachers looking to push boundaries are also putting on the production in their schools, she’s heard, and she was told about an unofficial reading in which theatre students at the University of Washington read the play aloud at the campus entrance on the first day of school. “They see it as a political statement,” she says.

On a personal level, the success of the play has transformed FastHorse’s life: It put her in a financial position to purchase a home with her husband, and it has completely changed how she’s perceived in the theatre community.

For the first time in her career, FastHorse is trusted as an artist whose work can appeal to a wide variety of audiences – an assumption much more easily given to non-Indigenous playwrights.

“I used to complain a lot about how white guys would just write a play and put it up, while I had to jump through 5,000 hoops,” she says. “Even with this piece, it was my most rejected play.”

Her work typically had to go through many levels of development before getting the green light. “Because I wasn’t given the benefit of a doubt. The Thanksgiving Play gave me the benefit of the doubt.”

To prospective audience members considering coming to the play, FastHorse warns her goal is to leave you with more questions than answers, which can be a little disquieting – though she’s confident the answers are out there for those who are truly looking to find them.

And if you’re open to sitting in the discomfort, she promises you’ll also laugh a lot.

“I was reading something recently about how laughter adds time to the end of your life,” she says. “So I figure my human service is to add a bunch of time to everybody’s lives around the world.”