Larissa FastHorse challenges Native American stereotypes in theater

The playwright’s work confronts erasure and reshapes Indigenous representation on stage.

Larissa FastHorse at the opening night of Les Misérables at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre on August 3, 2023, in Hollywood, California. Photo by Paul Archuleta/Getty Images

By Novanka Laras and Sarah Oktaviany

In the 1980s, when Larissa FastHorse was a high school student in Pierre, South Dakota, her friends would sometimes forget she was Native American. Conversations would turn to derogatory remarks about “drunk lazy Indians,” and she would have to remind them of her presence. The response was always the same—"Oh, well, not you!” This dismissive attitude followed her into adulthood, even after she had established herself as a successful playwright.

In 2023, when her play The Thanksgiving Play premiered on Broadway, she overheard audience members making racist jokes in a bathroom. They laughed about Native Americans being late because they “tell time by the sun” and “ride horses instead of driving cars.” Such casual racism, she noted, is part of a larger problem—the erasure of Native American identity.

Having lived in Southern California since 1991, FastHorse, 53, has often felt unseen as a Native American. “Everyone speaks Spanish to me in L.A.,” she said. “It’s lovely, but I have to fight to be recognized as Native American.”

Over the years, she has used her experiences in theater, nonprofit work, TV writing, and ballet to craft thought-provoking, often humorous plays. Her work challenges offensive stereotypes, such as the “Hollywood Indian” caricatures she saw growing up, while presenting more nuanced Indigenous characters.

Breaking barriers in theater

FastHorse’s plays highlight the struggle against Native American erasure. In The Thanksgiving Play, first staged Off-Broadway in 2018, four well-meaning white teachers attempt to create a historically accurate school pageant, replacing cheerful pilgrims and Thanksgiving prayers with gruesome portrayals of Native American massacres. What Would Crazy Horse Do? (2017) explores a fictional tribe’s encounter with seemingly benevolent Ku Klux Klan members.

She has also reimagined classic works through an Indigenous lens. She “Indigenized” a national tour of the 1954 Broadway musical Peter Pan, expanding the roles of Wendy and Tiger Lily while removing the offensive “Ugg-a-Wugg” song. For the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, she helped revamp the event by removing pilgrim imagery and replacing the iconic Tom Turkey’s pilgrim hat with a top hat.

These groundbreaking projects have earned FastHorse a long list of firsts: the first known Native American playwright to have a Broadway show, the first to have one of the most-produced plays in America, and the first Indigenous writer featured at many major theaters, including the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo) and River (Julie Bowen) fuel the central conflict in Larissa FastHorse’s Fake It Until You Make It, where they run rival nonprofit organizations. Photo by Makela Yepez

Her latest play, Fake It Until You Make It, running at the Taper, continues her exploration of identity and race. The production stars Julie Bowen (Modern Family) as River, a white woman who runs a nonprofit for disadvantaged Native youth, and Tonantzin Carmelo (Into the West) as Wynona, a Native American woman fighting for an environmental cause. The two compete for a prestigious grant, forcing audiences to question why many of the best Native organizations are led by white people and how “pretendians” (white individuals claiming Native ancestry) impact Indigenous communities.

“The way Larissa asks these questions, you think it’s going to be a ‘wokeapalooza,’” Bowen said. “But then she subverts every expectation and hits you with humor.”

From ballet to Broadway

Born in South Dakota to a Lakota father and a white mother, FastHorse was adopted at 11 months old by a white couple, Ed and Rhoda Baer. As a child, she wore leg braces due to tibial torsion, a condition that twisted her lower leg bones inward. A doctor recommended ballet for physical therapy, but it wasn’t until she saw an illustration of Maria Tallchief, America’s first prima ballerina and an Osage Nation member, that she realized Native American women could thrive in dance.

After training with Atlanta Ballet and Los Angeles Classical Ballet, she left ballet at 30 due to injuries and transitioned into screenwriting. She sold pilots to TeenNick and Fox, but neither was produced. “I was relieved,” she admitted. “They didn’t represent Native people the way I wanted.”

Playwriting, however, felt more natural. “When I first saw a play, I thought, ‘This is dancers with furniture. I know how to do this.’”

Her early works featured all-Native casts, such as Urban Rez, developed with Indigenous people from the Los Angeles Basin. However, securing production opportunities proved difficult. Frustrated, she wrote The Thanksgiving Play for four white actors, knowing it would have a better chance of being staged. “It immediately got produced,” said Michael John Garcés, who directed its 2019 run at Geffen Playhouse.

Changing the industry, one play at a time

FastHorse’s success brought recognition. She received awards from PEN Center USA and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, she won a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.” That same year, she co-founded Indigenous Direction with artist Ty Defoe to consult on Indigenous representation in media. Their work included transforming the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade to be more culturally respectful.

Carole Rothman, playwright Larissa FastHorse, and director Rachel Chavkin during the opening night curtain call for the Second Stage production of The Thanksgiving Play at the Helen Hayes Theatre on April 20, 2023, in New York City. Photo by Bruce Glikas/Getty Images

Three years later, The Thanksgiving Play debuted on Broadway to critical acclaim. Jesse Green, chief theater critic for The New York Times, praised it as a “brutal satire about mythmaking” and “cheerfully cutthroat.”

Director Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown), who worked on the production, initially hesitated, wondering if a Native director would be more appropriate. But FastHorse assured her that she needed “someone with extreme expertise in whiteness.”

Her latest work, Fake It Until You Make It, almost never made it to the stage. In 2020, Center Theater Group commissioned FastHorse to write a play for the Mark Taper Forum. However, she had no script or title. Theater executive Luis Alfaro suggested Fake It Until You Make It, reassuring her that she could change it later. When the name was publicly announced on banners, she realized, “I can’t change the name now, can I?”

The play was set to open in 2023, but just weeks before rehearsals, Center Theater Group suspended its season due to financial struggles. FastHorse received offers from theaters outside Los Angeles, but she fought to premiere the play in the city. It finally opened last week and runs through March 9.

“The play is a love letter to L.A.,” she said. “We’re making fun of a lot of things here. And the Taper was always meant to represent the people of L.A., so the fact that no Indigenous playwright had been on that stage before bugged me.”

A lasting legacy

FastHorse has multiple projects in the pipeline, including two TV series, a jukebox musical based on an unnamed band, and a solo show about her ballet career.

Her adaptation of Peter Pan continues to tour, with The Chicago Tribune calling it a “joyful introduction to a classic story” that is “more female-empowered and inclusive while retaining much of the original’s magic.”

Still, she remains acutely aware of the barriers Native American artists face. “People say, ‘We tried working with Native people once, and it didn’t work out.’ There’s this fear that I’ll be the one who ruins it for everybody.”

For FastHorse, the stakes are high. “I don’t want to be the cautionary tale.”