The New Yorker Radio Hour
A Lakota Playwright’s Take on Thanksgiving; Plus, Ayelet Waldman on Quilting to Stay Sane
29 Nov 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.”
Full Episode
Der Handel an den Finanzmärkten kann eine einsame Angelegenheit sein. Wenn Sie also wissen möchten, wie man den Dunkelmodus auf Ihrer Plattform aktiviert oder wie Sie auf Ihr Konto einzahlen können, dann ist es gut, wenn Sie mit einem echten Menschen sprechen. Bei Capital.com sprechen unsere Teams Deutsch, Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch und viele andere Sprachen.
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 like to tell and grew up on,
und was tatsächlich passiert wäre. Wenn Sie denken, Sie würden gerne sehen, dass gutmeinende Liberale ihre eigenen guten Intentionen verursachen, dann ist dieses Spiel für Sie. Als das Thanksgiving-Spiel letztes Jahr auf Broadway premierierte, sprach unser Kritiker Vincent Cunningham mit der Schauspielerin Larissa Fasthorse.
Sie ist die einzige Native Americanin, die ein Spiel auf Broadway produziert hat.
I grew up in South Dakota, where my Lakota people are from. But I was adopted at a young age, an 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 whiter than that. I don't know, maybe opera, I'm not sure. There's a list, but ballet is at the top. They're way up there, yeah. They're always in the top five. So... Damals, als ich jünger war, war es sehr schmerzhaft, von vielen Dingen zu entfernen.
Ich fühlte mich, als hätte ich nicht in der Reservation geboren, oder als ich so lange von meiner Lakota-Familie entfernt war.
Das war sehr schwer, aber jetzt erkenne ich es wirklich als meine Superkraft, dass ich Lakota-Kultur und ursprüngliche indigenische Erfahrungen verwenden kann und sie für weiße Publikationen übersetzen kann, die leider die Mehrheit der Publikationen im amerikanischen Theater sind.
Ich möchte zurückkommen zu diesem Thema Ballett, weil es scheint, als wäre es ein sehr wichtiges Teil deines Lebens, dass du ein professioneller Balletttänzer bist. Wie viel trainiert du als Tänzer? Wie viel bleibt dir das mit? Ist das ein Teil deines Ansatzes als Schauspieler? Denkst du oft darüber nach, wenn du arbeitest?
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