The Playwright Larissa FastHorse Doesn’t Want to Be a Cautionary Tale

In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was in high school in Pierre, S.D., friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Talk would turn to the area’s “drunk lazy Indians,” she said, and “I’d be like, ‘um, excuse me, I’m right here.’”

“And then it was always, ‘Oh, well, not you!’” she continued.

Even after FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” opened on Broadway in 2023, the “not you” slights continued. At one of her own plays in New York, she overheard women in the bathroom joking about how Native Americans would be late to the show because they tell time by the sun — it was an evening performance — and because they would be taking horses, not cars. “People say crazy stuff like that all the time,” she said.

In Southern California, where she has lived since 1991, it rarely occurs to strangers that she is Native, or, as she noted, that anyone might be. “It’s all part of the great erasure,” she said.

“Everyone speaks Spanish to me in L.A.,” she said. “Which is fine, it’s lovely. But it’s like I have to fight to be Native American here.”

Over the years, FastHorse, 53, has transformed her experiences as a Native American navigating her way through the worlds of theater, nonprofits, TV writing and ballet into thought-provoking, often wickedly funny work. Her plays are both a way of confronting that “great erasure” — “the last thing people tend to think about are Native Americans,” she said — and replacing offensive stereotypes, like the “Hollywood Indians” she grew up watching on TV, with more nuanced and human portrayals.

In “The Thanksgiving Play,” which premiered Off Broadway in 2018, four well-meaning white people struggle mightily to produce a more historically accurate holiday pageant for grade schoolers, replacing happy pilgrims and prayers of gratitude with a bag of bloody Native American heads. In “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” (2017), the last members of a fictional tribe encounter a pair of kinder, gentler Ku Klux Klan members.