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  • The Practical Limits of Liberal Piety Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play
  • James H. Cox (bio) and Alexander Pettit (bio)
The Thanksgiving Play. By Larissa FastHorse, directed by Bruce DuBose, performances by Kelsey Milbourn, Jenny Ledel, Garrett Storms, and Ben Bryant, 1711. and 112. 2019, Undermain Theatre, Dallas, TX.

A remarkable new comedy, Larissa FastHorse's (Sicangu Lakota) The Thanksgiving Play, premiered at Playwrights Horizon in New York in 2018. In November 2019, a cluster of performances at eight American theaters helped place The Thanksgiving Playamong the ten most produced American plays of the 2019‒20 season, according to American Theater(Tran). 1FastHorse is the first Indigenous playwright to appear on this list (Tran). In terms of market saturation—and, assuming good attendance and short-term box office receipts— The Thanksgiving Playmight be the most successful Indigenous play ever staged in the United States. 2

Performances that we attended at Dallas's Undermain Theatre on November 17 and December 1, 2019, inspired this essay, which represents our attempt to initiate scholarly conversation about FastHorse's play. Bruce DuBose directed that superb production, which featured Kelsey Milbourn (Alicia), Jenny Ledel (Logan), Garrett Storms (Jaxton), and Ben Bryant (Caden). The cast was exclusively white, consistent with FastHorse's stipulation that actors either be "Caucasian looking" or "people of color that can pass as white" (FastHorse 5). Even without any Native cast members, this self-described "comedy within a satire" (Norris interview) is radically Indigenocentric. With an activist's determination and the enthusiasm of a theater aficionado, FastHorse claims non-Indigenous theater and drama for an Indigenous enterprise. [End Page 220]Rather than treating with or paying homage to them, she shapes non-Indigenous materials into a critique of their originating culture.

Keeping Indigenous characters off the stage is central to FastHorse's comic method and political appeal: the play, set in a high school classroom, dramatizes "four white people making a culturally sensitive First Thanksgiving play for Native American Heritage Month" (FastHorse 25). Their doomed attempts provide much of the play's humor and culminate in a provocative final scene. At play's end, the quartet of actors moves upstage right, preparing to exit. The wokerthan-thou Logan glances back and notices "the empty center of the room" downstage (61). This "perfectly equitable emptiness," as Logan grandly designates it (61), will, her partner Jaxton declares, "[break] the cycle of lies, stereotypes and inequality" (62). Maybe, but when the two characters credit themselves for having "created this nothing together" (62), they out themselves as phonies. This paradoxical act of "creation" does not admit of agency, and laying claim to it is crass and presumptuous, like the group's prior attempts at theater-making. They have simply vacated a certain space.

If anything, the Undermain performance suggested to us that Logan and Jaxton have created the agent of their own disappearance or destruction. They "feel" in that relinquished space (62) what Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Ojibwe) calls the "aesthetic presence" of an Indigeneity that signifies "sense of self," neither an "essence" nor an "immanence," but "the mien of stories" (20). The production ended with the lingering center-stage spotlight—an expulsive "aesthetic presence"—vanquishing the couple. 3Ledel and Storms paused in the darkening periphery before hurriedly yielding the stage to a luminous and mocking visage that they, like the audience, can only sense. DuBose and his team tweaked this scene during the run. In November, Ledel and Storms played anxious. By December, they were fearful. The extra beats that they added to their exit allowed Storms to reprise an earlier gesture: folding his hands and pulling them toward his belly to indicate "I'm feeling less than" (48). Good riddance, says a production that emphasizes FastHorse's interest in claiming or reclaiming theater history, dramatic form, stage-space, and, inevitably, land. By withdrawing, Logan and Jaxton vitalize the space where the spotlight falls. The spotlight is the "mien"; the "mien" is the face of post-whiteness.

FastHorse works diligently to make a light shining on an empty space [End Page 221]succeed both formally and politically. As she explains, she has "hidden" Indigenous issues in this play rather...

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