Statement from University Theatre

To the Campus Community.

After conversations with University Theatre and departmental colleagues, I am writing in
response to recent claims made online and in the student newspaper about Larissa
FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play. Some of these statements have characterized FastHorse’s
play as racist. As the director of the play, I feel a responsibility to address this issue directly.
This characterization is incorrect, risks causing harm to the reputation of a groundbreaking,
nationally recognized, award-winning Native American artist, and silences conversation on our
own complicity in perpetuating Native myths while on Native land.

Larissa FastHorse is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Sicangu Lakota Nation.
She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2020 MacArthur Genius Award winner. These are just
two of her many awards and honors. With the 2023 production of The Thanksgiving Play at
the Hayes Theatre, FastHorse also became the first known Native American woman playwright
to have her work produced on Broadway. According to American Theatre Magazine, The
Thanksgiving Play was among the most produced plays of 2019-2020 and 2023-2024 seasons.
FastHorse is the first known Native American playwright to appear on this most-produced list.
At its core, The Thanksgiving Play is an act of artistic resistance. FastHorse wrote it to bring
Indigenous perspectives into theatre spaces that have historically excluded those perspectives.
As FastHorse herself has explained many times in interviews, she wrote The Thanksgiving Play
in direct response to being told repeatedly by theatre directors that her plays were
“unproducible” due to their casting requirements. In 2016, FastHorse described the moment
she decided to write The Thanksgiving Play: “Theatres claim they don’t know any Indigenous
actors or they cannot afford to bring in Indigenous actors. I believe that America is not done
needing to hear about Indigenous issues and stories, but I didn’t want to continue to fight; so I
said, fine, I have two weeks of my fellowship, I’m going to write a play straight through that is
entirely about Native American issues that does not necessarily use Native Americans. That’s
the challenge I put out for myself. Fortunately, I really like the play that resulted”
(Howlround).

The Thanksgiving Play follows four theatre artists as they attempt to devise a “culturally
sensitive” Thanksgiving pageant. Throughout the play, FastHorse exposes the absurdity of
well-meaning white theatre makers who attempt to tell Indigenous stories without Indigenous
voices. As Indigenous theatre maker Sierra Rosetta, who directed the play at her own
predominantly white Midwestern college, has written: “Trying to imitate the experience of a
Native person onstage without a Native presence in the room is redface” (Howlround). The
play makes this argument from the inside, in a way that invites audiences (and the theatre
artists working on the show) to recognize their own implicit biases and cultural ignorance.
The Thanksgiving Play is a satire, which means its primary purpose is to challenge its audience.
As a genre, satire strategically incorporates sarcasm, exaggeration, humor, and/or parody for
the purpose of social criticism or to target cultural norms or those in positions of power. The
play’s satirical “racist interludes” are not endorsements of racism. They are indictments of
racism. They deliberately critique what young people in the United States learn in school and
what we think we know about Native Americans or the first Thanksgiving because of these
early experiences. FastHorse chose songs and poems for these interludes that she found in
real lesson plans available for teachers on the internet (some were posted as recently as
2016). As Rosetta has written of her own experience directing the play: “I found this element
of the play to be the most effective step toward audience members recognizing that what they
thought they knew about Thanksgiving and Native Americans was not accurate” (Howlround).
Theatrical satire is a challenging genre. It often does not work on the page in the same way it
works on the stage. In a 2023 interview with American Theatre Magazine, FastHorse writes of
satire:

“It is tricky. It has to be honest. It really has to be honest. You can’t pull your punches.
You can’t be afraid of things. A lot of satire actually sounds worse on the page. It’s like:
Oh, can you really say that? Then you put it in context with the movement and the joke
and the rhythm, the ups and downs of the satire and the humor, and it’s like, Oh, okay—
that works. So you have to be that honest, and trust the honesty of it. If you pull back,
then it’s not going to work. It just feels false. You have to go all the way in.” (American
Theatre)

I, along with colleagues in University Theatre and in consultation with the company, have
made the difficult decision to cancel The Thanksgiving Play and pivot to a different
production this semester. The irony of this decision considering the way The Thanksgiving
Play itself ends is not lost on me, but the decision reflects the realities of our campus climate. I
remain committed to the values this play embodies: amplifying Indigenous voices, challenging
comfortable assumptions (including my own), and creating theatre that asks audiences to
examine what they think they know.

I will end with FastHorse’s explanation of how her play reflects Lakota storytelling,
I’d say the structure in all of my plays is very Lakota. When we tell a story, there’s always
two endings: You end the story once, the “plot” of it, if you will, and then there’s the
second ending that’s kind of the application, the way it applies to you and the way it
should be taken into the world. All my plays have two endings” (American Theatre).
Without the ending that a fully realized production of The Thanksgiving Play would have
provided to our campus community, I encourage you to engage in the second ending. A great
place to start is by attending the many wonderful events St. Lawrence’s Native American Affairs
program has scheduled this semester. I hope to see you there!