Director's Notes

Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) has given a lot of thought to laughter. The playwright, choreographer, and recent MacArthur grant recipient, elaborated on her stance toward comedy and satire in a 2018 interview for American Theatre Magazine: “My favorite laugh in the theatre is when a person laughs, and then you hear them stop themselves from laughing.” In that same interview, FastHorse notes that labeling a play a comedy can mean “death for critics.” All the same, she embraces the label of satire for The Thanksgiving Play, which has become one of the top ten most produced plays in the United States (FastHorse is the first Indigenous playwright whose work has achieved that level of production) and is set for a Broadway run in 2023.

One only has to look at the list of Tony recipients for Best Play or Oscar winners for Best Picture during the last twenty years, to note that awarding bodies continue to skew heavily towards the “tragic” in the performing arts. This critical bias is nothing new. We can trace comedy’s debasement in Western Theatre all the way back to the fourth century B.C.E. when Aristotle theorized and differentiated tragedy and comedy as embodied forms of representation in The Poetics. The philosopher maintained that tragedy imitated men of a “higher type” while the comedy depicted the “lower type.” Not only were tragic figures meant to occupy the upper echelons of society as kings and questing warriors of divine origin, but they played out their actions in distant, mythological pasts. Tragic heroes were larger than life, often broadly drawn, and historically remote. They were also crafted to reflect the dominant demographic of ancient Greek society, the white male citizenry who made up their audiences. In contrast, our earliest examples of Attic comedy are rife with specificity. Not only did it include working-class people, but it lampooned public figures, and cast an absurd lens on fraught political events of the moment. If tragedy’s power lay in its remoteness, then comedy’s lay in its specificity.

The devil is in the details in The Thanksgiving Play. FastHorse crafts a highly idiosyncratic cast of characters, who, for all their quirks, unite in a misguided attempt to devise a play that manages to sensitively celebrate Thanksgiving and Native American History month without including any Indigenous people in the process. As the audience watches them fumble through cringe-worthy moments of cultural appropriation and ego-driven displays of political correctness, we must also engage with the gory colonial history and continued Indigenous suppression that the Thanksgiving mythology works to sidestep, normalize, and askew. We have all met versions of the people in this play. Whether it’s the neighbor who won’t stop virtue signaling about their diet, the person in line at the grocery store who judges someone for their big box purchase, the climate activist that takes a personal jet to an environmental conference, or the wealthy classmate pulling focus so that their perspective is the loudest in the room, we have encountered them. We may have even been them ourselves. It is in those moments of recognition, when we see versions of ourselves or the people we care about make ridiculous mistakes, that the subversive power of The Thanksgiving Play shines through. It is in those moments of transgressive absurdity that social critique can occur. In FastHorse’s hands, white privilege is a laughing matter, but it is not a celebratory laughter. It is the laugh that becomes self-aware and then stops itself.