How ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Launched Its Trailblazing Playwright’s Very Busy Year

variety.com:

Gordon Cox Theater Editor With the new production of her comedy “The Thanksgiving Play,” Larissa FastHorse has become the first known Native American female playwright on Broadway.

Now she can cross it off her to-do list. Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below: “I’ve had this goal for a long time,” FastHorse, a winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant,” said on “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast. “I told my agent probably 10 years ago that I wanted to be the first Native American female playwright on Broadway, because sadly we haven’t had one that we know of.

I was very clear that I wanted to be that person.” FastHorse is also the first Native American playwright on Broadway since Lynn Riggs, the writer of Cherokee descent whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” was the inspiration for “Oklahoma!” His last Broadway run was way back in 1950.

In 2019, “The Thanksgiving Play” was one of the top 10 most-produced plays in the United States — and that was no accident. On Stagecraft, FastHorse recalled hitting repeated roadblocks in getting her plays produced, and explained how that spurred her to get strategic in writing “Thanksgiving Play.” “I hit a wall of having my plays commissioned and produced by the commissioning theater company that put money into it and development into it, and then the play would not go beyond that,” she said. “I was being told my plays were un-castable because they had Native American characters in them.” So, FastHorse continued, she made a choice: “I said: Okay, fine, American theater.