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      ‘Thanksgiving Play’ by Larissa FastHorse Comes to Broadway

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      As Larissa FastHorse worked with the Broadway cast of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which centers on four white people trying to put on a “culturally sensitive” holiday production, one of the actors, Katie Finneran, spoke up in a rehearsal with a suggestion: Perhaps she could drop a swear word during one of her more exasperated lines?“I’m the drama teacher!” Finneran’s character exclaims as her plan to make a socially progressive elementary school play begins to fall apart.FastHorse politely declined. From the work’s conception in 2015, she had intended it to be curse-free, in the hopes of finally having a widely produced play. Her other work — including the play “What Would Crazy Horse Do?” — involved Native American characters, leading producers to call them “uncastable.”So, FastHorse wrote one with white characters, while still focusing on contemporary Indigenous issues. If the play were littered with profanity, FastHorse decided, some theater producers or audiences might reject it.Larissa FastHorse instructs children dressed as turkeys on their choreography for the films, which were made at a school in Brooklyn. In the play, the films are shown between scenes.Justin J Wee for The New York Times“Being from the Midwest, there are people who won’t go to a play with swearing,” said FastHorse, who grew up in South Dakota. “And those are some of the people I want to reach.”Her gambit worked. After “The Thanksgiving Play” had its Off Broadway debut in 2018, it became one of the most produced plays in America, as it found homes at universities, community theaters and regional groups. In 2021, a streamed version starred Keanu Reeves, Bobby Cannavale, Alia Shawkat and Heidi Schreck as the quartet of bumbling thespians. FastHorse has even heard from people who have read the play aloud on Thanksgiving with their families, turning the activity into a yearly tradition.Now, “The Thanksgiving Play” has made it to Broadway, where it is in previews and is set to open on April 20 at the Helen Hayes Theater. This production, directed by Rachel Chavkin, includes a multimedia element not seen in the Off Broadway version: a series of filmed scenes, featuring children who act out cutesy Thanksgiving pageantry — think feathers and pilgrim attire — while also giving voice to some of the casual brutality with which white American culture has long portrayed Native Americans.In one of the films, older children dressed as pilgrims pretend to shoot down younger children dressed as turkeys. (Lux Haac designed the costumes.) The adults instructed the turkeys to “take a nap” when it was their turn to fall.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesFastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, will be among the first Native American artists to have their work on Broadway. It’s the kind of achievement that the theater world likes to applaud, while perhaps also cringing at the fact that it has taken this long.The play’s skewering of the performative progressivism of the white theater world adds another layer. Its central characters tie themselves in knots trying to stage a play for Native American Heritage Month without actually including any Native Americans. They fret over fulfilling the requirements of a grant, sweat over gender stereotypes, debate the merits of colorblind casting and employ terminology like “white allies” and “emotional space.” To make this production even more of the moment, FastHorse added an exchange about pronoun sharing and references to the “post-B.L.M.” world.“Even though it does openly poke fun at a lot of the folks that I work with who are more on the liberal side,” FastHorse said, “I was really trying to make it so everybody can kind of see each other.”The play’s avatar for the more conservative audience members is a newcomer named Alicia (played by D’Arcy Carden), a hired actress who is unfamiliar with the language of social progressivism.What distinguishes Alicia is a complete lack of concern about so-called political correctness. The others are eager to prove themselves as “enlightened white allies,” including the loudly vegan drama teacher (Finneran), her yoga-loving boyfriend (Scott Foley) and a know-it-all history teacher (Chris Sullivan) who likes to preface his insights with, “Actually …”Rachel Chavkin, the director of the Broadway production, with some of her young actors ahead of filming. Chavkin envisioned this video as embodying the “colonialist narrative” that many American students are taught.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesOn Broadway, as in many industries, the anxiety around screwing up was magnified three years ago, after the murder of George Floyd prompted a wider reflection on racism and inequity in myriad industries and fields. In the theater world, that re-evaluation led to the publication of “We See You, White American Theater,” a document calling for an elevation of works by playwrights of color and more people of color in leadership positions, among other demands.So when FastHorse asked Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown,” to oversee the Broadway run of “The Thanksgiving Play,” Chavkin first wanted to make sure that the playwright wouldn’t prefer a person of color to direct.FastHorse said she wanted someone on the creative team — otherwise made up of people of color — who understood what it was like to be a “well-meaning liberal white person.” In other words, someone who has felt the urge to say all the right things and appear as progressive as possible.“She said, ‘I need your expertise,’” Chavkin recalled.FASTHORSE, 51, has had a winding path to Broadway. She started out as a professional ballet dancer, before an injury led her toward film and television. After she became exhausted by that industry’s handling of Native American issues, she switched to theater, where she observed that people tended to be more open to doing the work necessary for sensitive and accurate portrayals, she said.Around the same time that she started writing “The Thanksgiving Play,” she co-founded a consulting firm called Indigenous Direction that began advising arts groups on Indigenous issues.From left, Henrik Carlson, Ruhaan Gokhale and Christopher Szabo prepare for their scene. The adults directing them explained that they were demonstrating the troubling way that Thanksgiving has been discussed in schools.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesAlong with Ty Defoe, an artist from the Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, FastHorse began working with an important company in Thanksgiving — Macy’s — on a question not unlike the one at the center of her play: How could they make it so the Thanksgiving Day Parade, a celebration of colonialism to many Native Americans, was not causing continued harm?Under FastHorse and Defoe’s counsel, the 2020 parade included a Wampanoag blessing and a land acknowledgment recognizing that Manhattan is part of Lenapehoking, or the land of the Lenape people. Last year’s parade added a float designed in consultation with Wampanoag artists and clan mothers.Macy’s also agreed to make a cosmetic — but, to the consultants, important — change: Tom Turkey lost his belt-buckle hat, and in its place appeared a top hat. He is no longer portrayed as a pilgrim, Defoe said, but a “show turkey.” A Macy’s spokeswoman said the change was part of their “re-evaluation of potentially upsetting symbolism.”On Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that the process of staging a play about white people discussing Native American representation can start to mimic the script itself.“We’ve had a lot of questions: a lot of questions about Larissa’s life experiences, a lot of questions about what she wants to accomplish,” said Sullivan, who portrays the history teacher. “I’m coming awake to all of the things I didn’t even realize I needed to be thinking about.”There tends to be some guilt, FastHorse said, in the rehearsal room over a lack of knowledge of the horrors perpetrated against Native Americans, including the Pequot Massacre in 1637, which figures prominently in the show.Though it is first and foremost a comedy, the play does not shy away from violent imagery and rhetoric, even when the actors involved are children.TO FILM THE VIDEOS, which are shown between the live scenes, Chavkin and FastHorse gathered two dozen children and teenagers in February inside the auditorium of the St. Francis de Sales School for the Deaf in Brooklyn. Some were dressed as flamboyant turkeys and others wore stereotypical pilgrim costumes, with belt-buckle hats and wooden guns.For the New York City-based elementary and middle school students dressed as pilgrims for the video, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesThe vision, Chavkin said, was to chart the course of how young people are taught to understand Thanksgiving, from 5- and 6-year-olds singing a silly song involving pumpkin patches and teepees, to high schoolers discussing the 1997 police crackdown on a march of Native Americans in Plymouth, Mass.“You watch young people move through the educational system,” Chavkin said. “What we’re trying to do over the course of these four films is make that arc really palpable, starting with sort of obediently following a very nationalist, colonialist narrative.”In one scene, four Indigenous children, some flown in from across the country, perform a punk rock version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” complete with a dummy of Theodore Roosevelt with a plastic saber stuck in him.Of course, if you’re asking 12-year-olds to sing part of “Ten Little Indians,” a 19th-century nursery rhyme that includes disturbing lyrics involving the death of Native Americans, you need to explain why.FastHorse told the children before filming that she had found these lyrics (including the couplet, “Two little Indians foolin’ with a gun …. One shot t’other and then there was one”) in a student activity posted online for teachers.“We want adults to be aware that this isn’t OK,” FastHorse told them. “The song actually exists and is still being put out into the world.”The young actors nodded that they understood. For them, as elementary and middle school students in New York City, Thanksgiving pageants are an unfamiliar relic of history. These days, they said, their teachers mostly avoid the subject. More

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      ‘How to Defend Yourself’ Review: The Murkiness of Consent, and Friendship

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      In Liliana Padilla’s play at New York Theater Workshop, college students find empowerment and life lessons in a DIY self-defense class.If an attacker grabs you by the wrist, dip your elbow, turn your hand palm-up, twist and use leverage against the person’s thumb to extract yourself. If the attacker is straddling you, buck your hips, grab an arm and flip the person over.Though North Gym Room 2, with its drab walls and paltry set of yoga mats, aerobic steppers and stability balls, doesn’t look like much, at least the self-defense moves being taught there are legit.Because in Liliana Padilla’s “How to Defend Yourself” (winner of the 2019 Yale Drama Series Prize), none of the undergrads in the class really know what to do. They are still reeling from a peer’s beating and rape by two frat guys.The play, directed by Padilla, Rachel Chavkin and Steph Paul, opens a few minutes before the first session of a DIY self-defense class presented by Brandi (Talia Ryder) and Kara (Sarah Marie Rodriguez), sorority sisters of the victim, who has been hospitalized since the attack.Diana (Gabriela Ortega) and Mojdeh (Ariana Mahallati) arrive first. Diana, who is loud, tough and gun-obsessed, hopes to unleash her inner Tyler Durden in a real-world fight club; her friend Mojdeh is more concerned with how they’ll get into Brandi and Kara’s sorority. And there’s also Mojdeh’s upcoming date with James Preston, an Adonis of the college’s senior class. Nikki (Amaya Braganza), formerly known as Nicollette (“It’s a new thing,” she says meekly), creeps in late, shyly sliding her body into the room. Brandi, a practitioner of various martial arts, leads the group, including Kara, and, later, two well-meaning frat boys, Andy (Sebastian Delascasas) and Eggo (Jayson Lee), who also participate in the consent exercises and counter drills.The shots and blocks traded in the class are always martial but not always physical; rifts within the group are exposed during disagreements about how and when to safely express one’s sexuality with a partner and how to act in situations where the rules of consent seem to be a bit hairier. Diana worries about how Mojdeh, so desperate to lose her virginity, will fare in her dating life. Eggo and Andy fumble through an uncomfortable conversation about what one of them witnessed on the night of the assault. Brandi and Kara cruelly blame each other for what happened.But as the play progresses, almost exclusively in these defense classes, it feels as if the playwright is struggling to figure out where, and with whom, she should set the play’s highest stakes. At first it seems as if “How to Defend Yourself” will focus on Diana and Mojdeh, that their evolving relationship to their own bodies in this class will illuminate their friendship with each other, and vice versa. Then it seems perhaps we’ll land with Brandi and explore the origins of her own trauma.Ortega, left, and Mahallati as friends whose motivations for joining the class go beyond learning self-defense.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor as much as the play aims to engage the audience in a fly-on-the-wall view of a group of people — several of whom are meeting for the first time, developing and changing in relation to one another in this contained space — it still neglects to provide the necessary context to make the pre-existing relationships and the character arcs feel real. Likewise, there are occasional throwaway plot twists, like that worn-out trope of a surprise same-sex kiss between friends, that detract from the show’s more novel reflections.There’s Nikki’s newfound courageousness, sparked by a few defense drills. Andy’s abstract theories on sex and, later, his stunned realization that he looks like, the kind of predator his peers are learning to defend against. Group conversations about what sexual autonomy looks like if what a woman finds most pleasurable is relinquishing her control; what control looks like; to what extent many young women and men define their relationship to sex by their relationship to shame.Like the script, the direction occasionally taps into what makes these characters unique. A handful of perfectly timed, expertly revealing line reads can be heartbreaking, hilarious and vicious. “Can you lick my forearm?” Eggo asks during a consent exercise, with Lee, hilariously unpredictable, as the awkward sexual reject.Ryder has a tough task with Brandi, trying to convey the vulnerability behind the character’s bravado and stilted dialogue, but she can also be downright scary when Brandi’s edge comes out. When Diana quips, that it’s just a class, Brandi retorts, too sharply: “Does that make you feel safe?” Among the standouts are Ortega as the wild Diana; Braganza, shrinking and ducking out of sight as Nikki; and Rodriquez, whose Kara is volatile yet wounded. But too often their characters are forced to fade away from the main action.The show’s stylistic breaks from reality — brief interludes of choreographed fighting or dance, like one character’s beautifully articulated dance to Beyoncé’s “Formation” — also bring color and vitality to the play but could be woven through more consistently. (The exciting technicolor-style switches from sickly, stuttering fluorescents to raging club neons are by Stacey Derosier, and the bumping sound design, including a playlist of Rihanna and the Weeknd, by Mikhail Fiksel.)“How to Defend Yourself” rushes through a random patchwork ending that allows the production to show off some fancy stagecraft but doesn’t provide a satisfying narrative conclusion.Before their first class begins, Diana, in the midst of hyperbolic ramblings, says they’re in a “fiction of safety.” She could be talking about the United States, or the town they live in, or the college campus, or even North Gym Room 2, where they shadowbox hypothetical rapists and kidnappers. Either way, I’ve felt that “fiction of safety” too — sometimes when I elbowed and kneed mats in taekwondo, when I’ve aimed punches at my reflection in the boxing gym — that, despite my having a black belt and solid stable of jabs and crosses, there are still limits to the autonomy I have over my own body. So is safety really just a fiction?And if so, how do you defend against a lie?How to Defend YourselfThrough April 2 at the New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Sends Up America. Now It’s Coming to Broadway.

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      Rachel Chavkin will direct Larissa FastHorse’s satire, which takes aim at American mythology, next spring at the Helen Hayes Theater.“The Thanksgiving Play,” Larissa FastHorse’s satirical sendup about an elementary school drama teacher attempting to organize a culturally sensitive holiday pageant, is coming to Broadway next spring.Second Stage, a nonprofit theater that owns the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway, said it would present the play there in a production directed by Rachel Chavkin, the Tony-winning director of “Hadestown.” The theater did not announce dates or casting information.“The Thanksgiving Play” was staged at Playwrights Horizons in 2018, and has been widely produced around the country. A starry version, featuring Bobby Cannavale, Keanu Reeves, Heidi Schreck and Alia Shawkat, was streamed online last year by the producer Jeffrey Richards’s pandemic-era online play series.FastHorse is a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation of South Dakota, and Second Stage said she would be the first female Native American playwright produced on Broadway. Last year she won a so-called genius grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.“The Thanksgiving Play” will follow a production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Between Riverside and Crazy” on the Hayes stage. That production, directed by Austin Pendleton, is scheduled to begin performances this fall.Luke Thallon and Patsy Ferran in Bess Wohl’s “Camp Siegfried” at the Old Vic in 2021.Manuel Harlan/ArenaPALSecond Stage also said Thursday that at its Off Broadway theater it would present “Camp Siegfried,” a play by Bess Wohl set at a German American summer camp where adolescents flirt not only with one another, but also with fascism. The fall production will be directed by David Cromer; the play had a previous run at the Old Vic in London last fall. More

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      ‘Live From Mount Olympus’ Review: Oh My Godsss, Who Am I?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeBake: Maximalist BrowniesListen: To Pink SweatsGrow: RosesUnwind: With Ambience VideosAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Live From Mount Olympus’ Review: Oh My Godsss, Who Am I?This audio series translates the Greek myth of Perseus for teens, making its hero a young man still figuring out his destiny.The cast, crew and producers of “Live From Mount Olympus.”Credit…via the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast networkFeb. 17, 2021, 4:54 p.m. ETPuberty, curfews, fights with parents: Adolescence is hard enough without having to face down a Gorgon. Perseus has his work cut out for him.In the delightful new six-part audio series “Live From Mount Olympus,” a classic Greek myth is translated into a story for teens — and for adults who fancy a lively reimagining of the tales they learned in English class.Bulfinch? Hamilton? Eat your heart out.Presented by the Onassis Foundation and PRX’s TRAX podcast network, and produced with the Brooklyn theater ensemble TEAM, “Live From Mount Olympus” tells the tale of Perseus, the demigod hero who killed Medusa, the Gorgon with deadly peepers and a reptilian hairdo.This Perseus, though, isn’t the macho beefcake hero often portrayed in artworks and other adaptations of the story; here, he is an eager and naïve young man just figuring out his destiny. When he can focus enough to do so, that is. Divine Garland plays the excitable demigod with boyish charm and touches of the same brand of arrogance the Greeks loved to grant their mighty male protagonists.Perseus must travel to the far reaches of the human world to battle Medusa; good thing he’s got gods on his side. Libby King’s Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, comes off as an exasperated older sister — well, half sister, as she pointedly reminds Perseus, who is also a child of Zeus. “Let’s not get carried away, mortal,” she says, clearly irked by their kinship.The series’ biggest treat is a crossover from another work of mythic translation: André De Shields, who was the fleet-footed Hermes in “Hadestown,” appears as the messenger god again, and also serves as the suave narrator of the tale.Open-armed, fleet-footed: André De Shields plays the messenger god Hermes in “Mount Olympus,” as he did in “Hadestown.”Credit…Erik Tanner for The New York TimesDirected by Rachel Chavkin (“Hadestown”) and Zhailon Levingston (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical”), “Mount Olympus” is an accessible entryway into mythology. Running just about 15 to 20 minutes each, the episodes (written by Alexie Basil and Nathan Yungerberg) are snappy yet satisfying; the dialogue is set at a contemporary clip, with modern-day language. “Oh my godsss,” Perseus exclaims repeatedly, like a teen running into his crush at the mall.The grittier bits of the stories (violence, assault) are softened and maneuvered around gracefully without losing a sense of the problematic relationships and themes at work, especially when it comes to gender.David Schulman’s appropriately cartoonish sound design rises to the pep of the action and gameness of the dialogue, like the shuffle and flutter of Hermes making a hasty exit (he has to check on his “godcast” subscribers; popularity comes with a cost). And speaking of cartoons, this may be an audio production, but Jason Adam Katzenstein — whose often punny, sometimes droll and always comic illustrations make regular appearances in The New Yorker — provides eye-catching art for each episode.Perseus isn’t the only classic hero who’s gotten a teen makeover; theater makers have already been using Greek myths to appeal to this demographic. “The Lightning Thief,” based on Rick Riordan’s popular YA “Percy Jackson” series, targeted younger audiences on Broadway when it opened in September 2019. That same month, Public Works premiered “Hercules,” based on the 1997 Disney animated movie.Between the rivalries and the affairs, it’s everything tweens catch between the morning bell and sixth period, with the added bonus of fantastical landscapes and magical happenings. But there is also heft to these stories, which represent a belief system and vision of the world that no longer exists as a reality for a community of people, but nevertheless survives.So why not try on a pair of winged sandals and venture to a “cavern of serpent doom” as this young hero does? Grab your phone, too, in case you want to drop a quick TikTok with some nymphs on the way. Just be back by 10 p.m.: When in the heavenly realm of Mount Olympus, the worst thing you can do is get grounded.Live From Mount OlympusNew episodes through March 23; onassis.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More