The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Lakota Playwright’s Take on Thanksgiving; Plus, Ayelet Waldman on Quilting to Stay Sane

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that’s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. “First it’s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that’s the sugar, and then there’s the medicine,” the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it.” FastHorse was born into the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and was adopted as a child into a white family. She is the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. “When I was younger, it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things that I felt like I couldn’t partake in because I wasn’t raised on the reservation or had been away from my Lakota family so long,” she says. “But now I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture . . . and contemporary Indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are still the majority of audiences in American theatre.”This segment originally aired on April 14, 2023. Plus, earlier this year, the author and essayist Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay for The New Yorker about taking up a new hobby. Trying to cope with intensely stressful news, Waldman dove head first into teaching herself how to quilt. “I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine. I would quilt all day and then I’d go to sleep. It wasn’t like I was checking out; I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on,” she told the producer Jeffrey Masters. “But somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands, and I decided I want to know how and why.” Waldman talked with neuroscientists about the reason that certain brain activities seem to relax us. And to her surprise, it wasn’t hard to find hours each day, in the life of a busy writer, to pursue a new vocation. “Honestly,” she admits, “I was literally spending that time on the Internet.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Thanksgiving play is a play about the making of a play. It's also a very timely comedy about an awkward subject. The gap between the old story of the Thanksgiving holiday, the story we'd like to tell and grew up on, and what actually might have happened. If you think you might enjoy seeing well-meaning liberals

running a foul of their own good intentions, this is the play for you. When the Thanksgiving play premiered on Broadway last year, our critic, Vincent Cunningham, spoke with the playwright Larissa Fast Horse. She's the only Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. I grew up in South Dakota,

where my Lakota people are from, but I was adopted at a young age and open adoption to a white family who had worked on the reservation for a long time, the reservation that I'm from. I was always raised very aware of my Lakota identity and my Lakota culture, and they brought a lot of mentors into my life and elders to help me stay connected in that way. But at the same time, I was growing up in a very white culture. And my first career was in classical ballet, so it doesn't really get much wider than that.

I don't know, maybe opera, I'm not sure. There's a list, but ballet is on the top of the top of it. They're way up there, yeah, yeah, they're always in the, like, top five. So, you know, at the time, when I was younger, it was very painful, right? To be separated from a lot of things I felt like I couldn't partake in because I wasn't raised on the reservation or I'd been away from my Lakota family so long. And that was very hard, but now, you know, I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture and experiences and contemporary indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are the majority. of audiences still in American theater. Yeah.

I do want to go back to this thing about ballet because it does seem like this really important part of your life that you're a professional ballet dancer. And how much did your training as a dancer, how much does that sort of stay with you? Is that a part of your approach as a writer? Does it? Do you think about that often when you're working?

Oh, yes. My ballet background is hugely influential in my work. a playwright. First off, just in the work ethic, ballet dancers are expected to be shown something once, and then you work on it on your own, and you come back, and you've got it down. Like, people aren't going to sit there and spend a lot of time. Spoon feeding things or teaching you one thing at any time. You're expected to learn it. You're expected to do your own training at night after six hours of classes and rehearsal. You're, you know, you're expect to do a lot on your own,

and that kind of work ethic certainly has helped me as a playwright where you spend, you know, months sometimes, alone in your home writing, and you could miss that deadline. No one's going to yell at you. But also, you can really see it in my writing. There's a lot of movement-based acting, I guess, you know, text-free scenes in my work. The Thanksgiving play is a perfect example.

There's several scenes that have little-to-no text that are movement-based, and they are moving the story. forward and they're essential to the story, but without using text or very little text and a lot of movement and gesture. So the Thanksgiving play. It's about four people who, let's say, present as white, trying to put on a play about the first Thanksgiving and sort of trying and, I think, often failing to acknowledge this native presence that they are somehow trying to highlight. And I was thinking a lot about, let's say, what's happening in Florida.

about, like, how we educate our children about topics that might make them feel whatever, guilty or upset. How much of today's dramas over education and race and history, where are you thinking about with this new production? Oh, a lot. Yeah, I definitely have updated a lot for the times. It's interesting you mentioned Florida. The laws state if something causes, I think it's guilt, discomfort, or anguish based on your race. It can't be taught in a school, and you will –

Right. You'll hear, well, you'll see those words in the play if you come to it. I wanted to make sure that these people, because they are, I call performative wokeness. You know, these are white folks, liberal folks trying really hard to do everything right. And as you said, getting everything wrong. And I wanted to make sure that there are people of today and not someone who can look at, you know, I don't want people to be able to say, oh, well, since 2020, we've changed. So this isn't me because it definitely still is. Right.

But interestingly, one of my first writing mentors was the great Maritamita, who is a Maori writer and filmmaker from New Zealand, Etirot. And she said to me at my very first screenplay that I wrote before I was writing plays, she said, Larissa, you can be an artist or you can be an educator. If you try to be both, you'll do one of them badly. So you have to pick one. And I chose artist. And she said, there's certainly art that educates. and there's education that's artistic. But you have to choose which one you are

and stay true to that. I mean, I imagine that that tension is exacerbated by the expectations of the audience, right? I mean, just the way the arts happen in America, usually the audiences are white. Right. And they often, I think, I think it's fair to say

some people come to the theater on some level, hoping to have some sort of educational experience, as opposed to art. So it's like, what I love about your play is that it's like, no, you're just going to laugh and it's going to feel weird. And is that something that you like to play with

or is it something that feels like a hurdle? No, absolutely. I love that. One thing I love about this play, there's a character named Alicia, and she's played by Darcy Carton, a very funny, wonderful performer. And she's hired on the assumption

that she is a native person. Right. And I thought about this because a lot of the literature that I was raised on, black literature, passing is a big theme. What does passing mean to you on stage and all? You know, I'm a white passing in many ways, and yet at the same time, before I was writing when I was acting for a while, and the casting director said to me, we can tell you're not completely white, and that's a problem. And I was like, wow.

And I was like, okay, I'm done. There's nothing I can do about that. Is that America's subtitle? Is that perhaps the whole thing? Yes. That should be a little subtitle underneath. United States of America. We can tell you, not wait.

It's a problem. Yeah, so it was, you know, but I am very light-skinned. And, again, it was something that was sometimes painful because colorism is a thing in our communities. And it was sometimes painful that I was so light in white passing growing up with a lot of, you know, full-blood. my father is full blood and they're much darker, my biological father. And so I had some pain over that growing up, and especially because then I was raised away from it. It's like, who are you, you know, showing up again? However, then on the other side, on the white side, which is like American theater, I am quite sure that I get into rooms that not white-passing native people would not get into.

Yeah. It's funny. The other thing about Alicia is that she's brought in, you know, specifically, and like, not just to be an actorly presence, but it's like, we're going to use her expertise. And we're going to like, what do you have to say? Please tell us, you know. The wisdom. I would imagine that that has some corollary to your experience. Oh, it's exhausting. I always say, I just can't imagine what it would be like to just, like, for a white male playwright. Like, they just walk into a theater and they just to playwright and they don't do anything else. I can't imagine what that's like. I've never done it. Because, you know, I mean, I'm so fortunate with the career I've had, but I'm also the first one in 90% of the places I've worked. Like the first one in the theater, first one in, you know,

that just goes on every step. I've got six shows this year. And it's like most of them I'm the first Native American, right? I guess this is, you know, the privilege of being the first means that I also have responsibility. I do what I call Indian 101 that all of the staff has to come to, including front of house, box office, production, everybody, to help. them understand indigenous culture, the space they're standing in, and most importantly, our audiences that we're hoping to welcome into the theater, and how do we welcome them,

and understanding that theater is a white culture. Western American theater is a white culture. You know, the assumptions you're making of what's acceptable behavior in theater is completely different than what is normal behavior in so many cultures in this continent. One of the great things about the Thanksgiving play is that it spotlights so many things about theater that present to us as issues and actually say, well, do we really mean that? And I think we've all settled into an orthodoxy, let's say, of like, you can't play outside of your race, ethnicity, whatever, your look. But of course, what that means is if there's, if there aren't indigenous roles to play, indigenous actors are never able to do that act of representation.

In your experience, just working with actors and stuff, how have people, people start to think about that. So that's interesting because actually casting is still very complicated. Redface is being done regularly all over our country on film and TV, on stages. There are so many non-Indigenous

actors still playing Indigenous roles. And there's so many people calling themselves Indigenous that cannot in any way prove they're indigenous and have no actual connection to any Indigenous community playing indigenous roles. Right. People say they understand more

and they're doing better and yet there they are. All red faces being done constantly. Conversely, fascinatingly, when I, if you read the script of the Thanksgiving play, I put in the character description that people of color who can pass for white should be considered for roles. Right. And I was really proud of that. But when I get to New York, we were told we can't put that in the casting breakdown.

Well, you can't ask people to play someone else. I was like, wait, there are still white people on these stages in New York City right now playing Navy. Yeah, this was a few years ago, playing native, but you're saying I can't openly have non, you know, white people play white people if they look white to you, you know? And he's like, no, you absolutely can't. I'm not allowed to ask people if they're Native American when they're being cast. And so we have to do this whole kind of song and dance of I kind of try to figure it out by chit-chat and seeing like, and then people get all mad because we cast it not. someone that turns out they weren't native or they didn't have a connection to community. And it's just, it's this constant, like, thing, which is all part of, you know, what we're dealing with in Thanksgiving play.

Well, yeah, I mean, one way of interpreting the show is that it's about the sort of the most far-reaching implications of meaning well. It seems to me that the people that are going to come to Broadway shows are like these same well-meaning people. I don't know. What has been the response to that? This is kind of you. What, you know, how do you feel about that? Oh, it's absolutely you. I mean, no, like, I do not hide that.

You know, yeah. I don't hide the fact that this is about, you know, white liberal folks, which tend to be theater goers, not all. I mean, I think the thing that I keep saying, but it's been very important to me in this play was that, first, it's fun, and that you get to have a good time in the theater. And second, it's, I would say that's the sugar, and then there's the medicine.

Yeah. And so it's satire. It's a comedy within a satire. So the satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it through it. And, you know, honestly, some people opt out. We've had a couple, you know, a couple people walk out. Really? And, like, once it got too far in, they're just like, no, this is too much.

And I can imagine at least one scene where that might happen. Yeah. But, you know, the vast majority of audiences are really raucously responsive and really having a fun time. Last week we had audience members talking to the stage, like talking back, And, I mean, it just got wild. They added, like, six, seven, eight minutes to the show. Whoa.

Yeah, it was crazy. That's a lot of talking. It was a lot of talking from chatting and clapping and, you know, responding. And, like, we love that. Something that I've wondered because I think most people who live on Manhattan think about the Lenape only, usually before a show or something. And then someone comes out and does a land acknowledgement and say, this is the land of the Lenape people. How do you feel about that? practice. Yeah. I mean, land acknowledgement, honestly, I know in some places we're getting a little

tired of it, but I will say it's not everywhere. You know, for me and tell everybody in the United States of America, if you can name the indigenous land they're standing on, we need to keep doing it. Good. Yeah. But, you know, I always say too, though, land acknowledgement is a step. So it's the first step of many steps toward reparation. So you have to at least know who reparations are owed to for the land that you're on. Who are you paying rent to? And then you need to start paying the rent. Thank you so much for doing this.

Of course. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's so much fun. That's Larissa Fast Horse speaking with staff writer Vincent Cunningham last year when the Thanksgiving play premiered on Broadway. It's been produced all over the country. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you're feeling a little stressed out lately, not that I'm implying anything stressful is going on, you might do what I yell at Waldman did and take up a hobby. It begins with a pattern, or in the case of what's known as improv quilting, an idea, an emotion, or even just a whim. Today I'm in the mood to make circles. Then there's the fabric. You choose it not only by color, but also. how it feels in your hand. Should the fabric be slick or should it be nubly? Waldman is a novelist and essayist and earlier this year she wrote a piece for the New Yorker about quilting. Waldman

discovered that quilting was not just pleasant or useful, but a way not to go out of your mind. You sew two pieces together in a small block and then small blocks together in larger blocks each time returning to the iron to smooth the block and to the cutting table. She talked with producer Jeffrey Masters, and he's also a recent convert. Now, going back to last year, can you explain what was going on when you began quilting and how that launched you into this? It's such a strange. I don't even really understand it myself entirely, although I worked hard to figure it out in the essay that I wrote for you guys. So October 7th, I was born in

Israel. I have family there, but I've been a Palestinian peace activist for a really long time. On October 7th, that kind of lost my mind. As the news was coming in, I was getting more and more distraught, obviously. And I couldn't sleep. And I was seeing the attack in my head. And I was getting up. I was sleeping just a couple hours a night. And at some point, my older daughter and I, my daughter's very crafty.

So I had bought her some fabric in a little sewing machine. And I was looking at the sewing machine that I had bought. And I took my laptop over and I switched over to the, this video, I just googled how to make a quilt. And I found this video of this middle-aged lady. Hi, everybody. It's Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company, and I've got a really fun project for you today. Take a look at this quilt behind me. Gosh, doesn't this look like you worked hard? From that moment, from literally that moment, every waking hour for months, I was quilting. I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine, I would quilt all day, and then I'd go to

sleep. It wasn't like I was checking out. It was not that. So I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on, but somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands. And I decided I want to know how and why. And so you went to YouTube to learn how to do this. That's where I started too when I made first quilt. Well, what did you do it? Oh, I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you. I just felt this call, but I did relate to this concept you wrote about, which was I'd never heard of called piecing for cover. Yes.

I guess it just means you're making something for warmth to be used, not for display. And that I really relate it to because I wanted to make something useful. I'm like kind of obsessed with this idea of like the apocalypse and like what will happen if we like lose technology. And I was like, I make radio. Like, I can't trade a podcast episode for food. But, and I mean this like genuinely, if something felt like safe and like familiar that I now have this like skill I can like use if it all goes to hell. I haven't thought of it that way, but I think it's so, there it is really part of it in this way. I mean, what I want to make is I want to make something that I can find comfort in. I don't make small quilts ever. I make quilts that I like, I'll make a quote you can cuddle up under on the couch. But most of you. Mostly I make quilts. My first quilt was for a twin-sized bed, which is crazy. They're like, oh, do one that's like, you know, one panel. What about you? What was your first quilt? Oh, it was way too big for our first quilt. It's five feet by seven feet. Wait, exactly. You did the same thing. Yeah, it just all goes back to wanting to like make something useful. But tell me this. You said that when you first started quilting, you were doing it all day. Now,

How many hours do you spend a day quilting? Six. Okay, so you're like, what do you, like, what do you used to do with that time? But like on a weekend. Well, that's what I asked my husband. Oh, my God, this is the exact question. I said to Michael, dude, what did I do with my days before? But I think I swore to God, Jeffrey, I think I was just online.

I think a lot of this time is time I didn't even realize I was. was spending on the internet. And the reason I think I didn't even realize was because the physical act of wasting time for me is identical to the physical act of working. So if I get up for my laptop after spending the entire day on my laptop, I'm like, okay, well, that was working. And then if I really parse it out, how much of that time was actually working? Four hours, five hours, max, or nothing, depending on, you know, my state of procrastination. So honestly, I feel like I was literally spending that time on the internet. I think one of the things I like so much about your piece in New Yorker, too, is that this is not

just like one person's personal story about like what they do to de-stress and get less anxious. You actually interviewed brain surgeons and neuroscientists that confirm that this is like what, like, the vast majority of people also can't experience because of our like brain makeup and chemistry. Yeah. I mean, It's remarkable. I knew something had to be going on with my brain because I was feeling so different. I was managing stress. And I think it was the first time that I was stressing out about something.

And my husband said to me, why don't you go quilt? And I thought, huh, yes. And also what the heck is going on? So was that an immediate feeling in your brain, in your body? Totally. I smell the fabric. I hear the machine and I start touching the fabric. And I am like everything that's going on in, you know, that agitation you feel when you're stressed, that kind of feeling in your throat, in your stomach in the back, it just vanishes.

It's so curious. Let me tell you a little bit about what I think is going on in your brain and what all of these various neurosurgeons have told me. Okay. So some of it has to do with this idea of bilateral brain activity. So, you know, we have our right brain and our left brain. And when we are engaged in bilateral stimulation, that actually makes us relaxed. It induces a kind of comfortable feeling. And quilting and some other handwork is a very bilateral activity because you're using

both your hands. You're going back between things that are very technical and mathy and a kind of creative thing. And you're doing that sort of alternating back and forth. And then there's this amazing thing called, your default mode network. So the default mode network is this brain system that is active in when you're in the state of think about wakeful rest, right? You're letting your mind wander. It might be when you're on a walk, when you're not controlling what you're thinking about, right? And that kind of wakeful rest when your default mode network kind of switches on and takes over is very, very

restful. And when you go back to paying attention, you find yourself kind of rested and invigorated. You know, that reminds me that, like, in 2017, you wrote the book A Really Good Day about microdosing LSD as a way to help, like, mood and anxiety disorders. Right. Like, does quilting have the same effect for you? Totally. I mean, that's what's crazy.

Like, the book that I wrote, like, the big discovery I made, so a really good day is about an experiment, microdosing with LSD. And the big discovery I made doing all this research about psychedelics and the brain is that what psychedelics do is push your default. I mean, this is obviously very simplified. They push your default mode network off the track. And having your default mode network veer off into a new and different direction can be really productive. So to find out that this other thing that I'm doing is also, in inextricably linked to the default mode network is really fascinating.

That's also not illegal. There's no crime involved in quilting. You can read Ayelet Waldman's essay, piecing for cover at New Yorker.com. She spoke with Jeffrey Masters, a senior producer on our show. You and I, we're taking this show on the road. We're going to go to QuiltCon.

We're going to go to Missouri Star. You're going to turn the New Yorker radio hour into all quilting. The whole country is going to lose its mind. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. If you're traveling this week, be safe, good luck, and have a wonderful holiday. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barrage, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.