Earlier this week, Playwright Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation) was named one of 21 recipients who will receive the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. The grant is a “no strings attached” $625,000 stipend that is paid over five years. FastHorse’s focus in the theater has been to bring Native American perspectives into the space. One of her most well-known works The Thanksgiving Play, focuses on a group of white teaching artists trying to create a “woke” Thanksgiving theatrical event that “also celebrates Native American Heritage Month.”
In a video posted by the MacArthur Foundation, FastHorse says “From the beginning of my career, it’s been important to find ways to include Indigenous people and populations into my work, creating works that not only tell Indigenous stories and use Indigenous ways of thinking, but they also provide greater access to them to have agency over the way that they’re portrayed.”
The Thanksgiving Play was put on the top ten most produced plays in America this season, according to her website. This is the first play by a Native American “in the history of American theater on that list.”
Larissa FastHorse began her career as a ballet dancer, also working as a creative executive in the television and film industry. She left her Hollywood career in the late ‘00s. She said she wanted to find something more “fulfilling” in her life and she found playwriting, directing, and choreographing for the theater helped her to achieve that goal. FastHorse’s first play, Average Family, in 2007, depicting a reality television show featuring an Indigenous family and a white family, set the tone of dark humor and themes of marginalization and historical erasure that she continues to meditate on in her work.