LA-based playwright Larissa FastHorse is known for both farce and poignant drama, challenging stereotypes and celebrating modern-day Indigenous life. She became the first known female playwright of Native American descent to have a show produced on Broadway — The Thanksgiving Play in 2023. Her latest project, Fake It Until You Make It, is staging its world premiere run at Downtown LA’s Mark Taper Forum until March 9.
The play’s two main characters are Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo), a Native woman who runs an environmental nonprofit and wants to eradicate the invasive Butterfly Bush; and River (Julie Bowen), who’s white and leads a nonprofit that aids Indigenous communities. They’re competing for a grant to fund their organizations.
FastHorse tells KCRW that the women have differences around socioeconomic status and how they serve the Indigenous community.
“I work in the nonprofit world as a playwright much of the time, even though I do commercial theater as well, and seeing how the discrepancies and where you start affects where you end up … was really eye-opening for me, and something I thought, well, this is perfect for farce.”
Through the character River, FastHorse brings up questions: Does it matter who is in charge of these nonprofits — who gets the money and controls where that money goes?
“[River] thinks that she's just using the privilege and the resources she's been given … to do good in the world. I think, like many of the people that run these organizations that I've spoken to, also feel the guilt, right? White guilt is a real thing, but it's also earned, right? … Reparations is a real thing. But where is it, reparations? And … keeping yourself in a position of power while doing good? And maybe there's another way to go about that.”
Meanwhile, Wynona wants to protect her bloodline but is in a serious relationship with a white man. FastHorse, whose husband is white, brings up “the hilariously faulted science” of blood quantum, which controversially measures a person’s amount of “Indian blood” — in fractions. The U.S. federal government imposed this on Native people, then generations took it on themselves to have tribal sovereignty, she explains.
“For me to … talk about what it means to marry a white person, and now maybe your fraction is going to be too small, and your children can't be a member of the tribe, that's the big thing we have to think about. And that's something that government has forced on us, but we have to continue to deal with.”
Noah Bean and Julie Bowen perform in “Fake It Until You Make It” at the Mark Taper Forum. Photo by Makela Yepez.
However, the play stays light, and the characters’ feud becomes absurd — River even gets a restraining order that forbids Wynona from interacting with her cat. That actually happened in the Santa Monica apartment where FastHorse lives. “One woman got a restraining order on behalf of her cat against another woman because the cat liked the other woman more than her. … So we're all told that we had to call the police if we saw this woman petting the cat. So I actually started there, and I was like, ‘Okay, how do you get there?’ … And then that crosses into … calling the police on women of color, and what does that mean?”
FastHorse points out that in many different communities, people are pretending to be a race that they have no genetic connection to, and then profiting off of that. “Folks [are] switching to different races and saying that they think that's okay. I mean, if that doesn't say farce, I don't know what does.”
How does FastHorse balance satire with respect for her communities? “That's the world I live in … well-meaning white folks. … Those are the people I work with every day. … I give them some tough hits [in the play] because I truly believe they want to take it, and they want to learn more. … And then I am tough on my Native folks too, because, you know what, we do some dumb things. We've adopted some some lateral violence. We've adopted some colonizer ways that aren't good for us.”
“I really believe that there's plenty of work and room for all of us,” says Larissa FastHorse. Photo by Conor Horgan.
As for representation of Indigenous people in the theater industry, FastHorse says she’s seen a good shift since her career began, but it’s not enough.
“We do have playwrights [who] are getting produced regularly now. We do have directors [who] are working a little more regularly. And that's something that hadn't happened for a long time, not for lack of trying. … We're just fortunate now that the mainstream American theater is starting to let us in. … I do my best to open as many doors as possible. … I commit that every meeting I have, I say, ‘Hey, you know what? Thanks for considering me for this. But also, you need to think of these two other Native plays, or you need to think of these two other Native writers for this piece.’ Because I really believe that there's plenty of work and room for all of us.”