After being told that her scripts featuring Native American characters were uncastable, Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse turned around and wrote a play featuring an all-white cast — a satire following four well-meaning thespians’ attempt to write a politically correct elementary school play about the first Thanksgiving without the involvement of Native Americans.
A nationwide sensation, “The Thanksgiving Play” ran on Broadway last year and is now making its way to Colorado Springs.
“The Thanksgiving Play” will be Springs Ensemble Theatre member Kate Hertz’s directorial debut. At first, Hertz wasn’t sure about taking on the responsibility; then, they read the script and found the attitudes of the holier-than-thou “activist” characters to be hilariously and painfully real.
“I am not Native myself, but I am a person of color who’s had to operate in the art/nonprofit world for a while,” Hertz said. “So, I feel that Larissa gets me on a certain level.”
Courtesy: Springs Ensemble Theatre
Before Hertz found a mentor in professor Sarah Sheppard Shaver at Pikes Peak State College, they didn’t see a place for themself in theater. Historically, theater has excluded non-white actors from playing traditionally white roles.
Now, theater companies are increasingly asking audiences to suspend their disbelief around the diversity of their casts. After all, if audiences can accept a dinky prop as an automobile or the sound of waves over the PA system as a genuine ocean, then surely they can accept a racially diverse cast of actors portraying four biologically related sisters, as was done in Theatreworks’ 2022 production of “Little Women.”
“That’s just a story about family and loving each other, and it didn’t really change anything about the script or how we received it,” Hertz said. “It’s nice that we’re eliminating those barriers that aren’t really serving much of a purpose.”
Colorblind casting shouldn’t go both ways, though.
“It’s not subversive to cast a white person in a person of color’s role because that was happening forever … in Hollywood and in theater and in educational plays about the first Thanksgiving,” Hertz said. “Why can’t white people do it? Because you guys did forever, and we would like you to stop, actually.”
The characters of “The Thanksgiving Play” are at least smart enough to pick up on that fact. They attempt to involve a Native American actor in the play, not realizing until rehearsals that the actor they hired is a white person who uses their ethnically ambiguous look to snag roles.
Scrambling to find a last-minute replacement, the characters realize that they don’t know any Native Americans in their personal lives, and quickly throw their hands up in failure, deciding to proceed without Native American characters or actors. It’s a clear mockery of the people who told FastHorse that her plays would be difficult to cast.
Recalling the production of “Midge and the Butcher” last year, Hertz said that the play’s main character, a transgender girl, was a difficult yet essential role to cast authentically.
“We clearly have people of all demographics in all facets in the theater community. We can look hard enough. We can leverage our connections,” Hertz said. “And if you can’t cast your show about a certain kind of person, then maybe it’s not your story to tell.”
Through her characters, FastHorse cuts to the heart of a larger issue: how centering our activism on a desire to be perceived as good people can distract us from the opportunities we have to make an actual difference in the world.
“You are not perfect. It is annoying when you act like you’re perfect, and it’s also bad for you to act like you’re perfect because you’re not giving yourself room to actually learn and actually be better than you are,” Hertz said.
In allowing us to laugh at the ridiculous antics of her characters, FastHorse creates space for us to criticize and correct some of our well-intentioned but misguided attempts to be good people.
“The more we are laughing at these characters, the more meaningfully we are engaging with this text and the more we are laughing at ourselves,” Hertz said. “No one’s going to leave feeling like, ‘Oh, God, I’m a terrible white person. I need to go self-flagellate.’ You will laugh. You’ll feel like you maybe want to have important conversations you haven’t, and maybe look into things that you didn’t realize you didn’t know much about, but it’s funny, and it is kind of opening the dialogue.”
Springs Ensemble Theatre’s production of “The Thanksgiving Play” runs Nov. 7-24 at The Fifty-Niner. Tickets can be bought at springsensembletheatre.org.
The post “The Thanksgiving Play” explores the pitfalls of good intentions, colorblind casting appeared first on Colorado Springs Independent.