'Playbill': A History of "The National Theatre Magazine"

[When I caught WABC’s 22 October 2023 broadcast of Broadway Backstage Fall Preview, I was delighted to see the brief feature on the printing of Playbill, which happens in a plant in Woodside, Queens.  It gave me the idea of composing a short history of the program magazine for Rick On Theater, the result of which you see below. 

[The reporter on the segment, Charlie Williams, called Playbill “the quintessential magazine of theater and Broadway.”  That’s a little hyperbolic, I suppose, but it’s not wrong.  Danny DeVito, one of several actors in the broadcast introducing plays they’re in this season on Broadway—he was in I Need That, which ran 2 November-30 December 2023 at the American Airlines Theatre—said when asked about the first time he saw his name in a Playbill, “Playbill was always . . . that thing you saved.”

[Actor Michael Urie, who was in the revival of Spamalot at the St. James Theatre that opened on 16 November 2023 (Urie left the cast on 21 January 2024), the co-host of the show with Eyewitness News reporter Michelle Charlesworth, remarked, “This is one of the theater world’s most prized souvenirs.”

[Because of sentiments like those, I’m posting the history of Playbill on ROT.  I hope you enjoy the read.]

If you’ve ever been to a Broadway show, you were handed a Playbill as you took your seat.  Since 1884, the independently edited and printed Playbill’s been the program magazine for Broadway theater, and later Off-Broadway, New York City venues like the Metropolitan Opera House and other Lincoln Center venues, and Carnegie Hall, as well as major theaters in Boston; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Houston; Miami, and a number of other cities.  But how did this come to be?

First, let’s step back about a hundred years before what we in the United States know as a Playbill was printed.  First, ‘playbill’ is a generic noun that’s a synonym for ‘program’ (or, if you’re in the United Kingdom or many of its former colonies, ‘programme’—a French word the Brits borrowed, meaning pretty much the same as the American and British words). 

Programs were used in Europe for many kinds of entertainment events as early as the 18th century, such as musical performances, fêtes, athletic events, and so on.  For this post, I’ll stick mostly to theatrical presentations for my examination.

The earliest programs, also called handbills, were short, handwritten, one-page leaflets which merely listed the performers.  They were handed out to patrons as they entered one of the many theaters that began popping up in almost every town across England at the time.

When inexpensive printing became available, theaters started distributing these handbills widely around the marketplace and drinking establishments to entice potential audiences.  One-sheet playbills flooded the streets, spotlighting the names of top performers who drew large crowds.

These playbills told audiences what to expect of the offered performance, such as, perhaps, alterations to a well-known play—say a new ending to Romeo and Juliet in which the lovers survive to say good-bye to one another. 

In the 18th-century predecessor to music hall, the British take on vaudeville, theater managers offered a mixed bill of entertainments.  The program would list the evening’s bill, say a dramatic play followed by lighter fare such as a tightrope walker, a strongman, or slapstick pantomime, and the order in which they’d be presented.

Across the sea in the U.S., a change was brewing as the 19th century began.  The programs were made into little pamphlets with several pages so that advertisements could be sold.  Not only did the ads pay for the programs themselves, but they brought in a little extra income to the theater. 

This development proved very popular all around.  First, of course, the theater benefitted from the additional revenue—theater is a financially precarious enterprise even at the best of times—and the patrons got more interesting tidbits on the show beside the names of the actors, the writer(s), and the creative staff: the director could put in a statement and so could a living dramatist.  Drawings, and later photographs, could be included.

Theater is arguably the most ephemeral of arts.  Once the performance is over, there’s nothing left but the memory.  This new, expanded program was a free souvenir of the event—to be taken home and consumed at leisure and even retained as a keepsake or a memory aid.

(I have hundreds filed away, going back to 1974—and a few from even earlier than that.  I’m not a theatrical packrat; they’re for reference.  I use them all the time as a source of information on plays I saw decades ago when something I’m writing, mostly for Rick On Theater, comes up.  I only wish I’d started keeping my programs long ago when I was seeing some of today’s Golden Oldies!  I wrote about that time in “A Broadway Baby,” posted on ROT, 22 September 2010.)

The program booklets before the advent of the New York Theatre Program Corporation, which eventually became Playbill—I’m coming to that—were paid for by the theater or, in the case of a touring show, the producing company.  Small theaters, music halls, and provincial or country playhouses where there were touring companies or variety acts continued to use the single-sheet handbills.

Incidentally, there was another phenomenon that developed at this juncture.  Patrons in Britain pay for programs—it’s up to £2.50 in London ($3.15) and as much as €5 in Dublin ($5.40)—whereas, in the U.S., we still get them gratis.

From the early 1880s to the beginning of the World War I (1914 in Europe), the larger theaters in London’s West End saw the commercial possibilities in the elaborate theater programs.  The theater managers produced expensive programs full of illustrations and photos of the major actors and scenes from the play to sell to the patrons as souvenirs.

In 1916, the British government instituted an entertainment tax on theater tickets.  The sale of theater programs not only produced income for the impresarios’ pockets, but covered the tax cost as well, so the theater managers didn’t have to raise ticket prices.  The U.S. theater industry never had this burden.

Back in the States, even the advertisers were happy with the new development: it was a way to make direct and virtually one-on-one contact with potential customers.  Mass-circulation newspapers were unknown in the mid- and late 19th century, and theater at the time was the only truly popular entertainment—sort of the TV of its day.  The theater program was one of the few types of printed matter that was widely—and freely—distributed.

The enterprise was a huge success.  Paid advertising, principally for local business, in theater programs underwent a quick and speedy surge and forever changed the theater program.  It also eventually led to the establishment of the company that became Playbill.

An enterprising young man who had arrived in New York City from Ohio as a teenager without money, prospects, or contacts saw that this development was a real business opportunity.  In 1884, Frank Vance Strauss (1863-1939), who later changed his last name to Storrs during World War I because Strauss was German, approached the managers and owners of the larger New York playhouses and offered them a magazine-style theater program at no cost.  Strauss made his money from the program from the advertisers. 

Though the name didn’t appear for decades, this was the beginning of Playbill.

Every theater that signed up for the magazine got pages with the cast list and brief information about the performance—such as setting and time of the action, act and scene breakdowns, and musical numbers—plus a cover in color.  The rest of the program booklet was the same for every theater with short articles on the New York theater scene, stage personalities, and other features—plus the ads.  

The program magazine didn’t have its own title at this point; the cover bore the name of the theater at the top.  In 1911, Strauss named his company the Strauss Magazine Theatre Program and in 1920, his company took the name New York Theatre Program Corporation.  In 1934, the magazine became The Playbill and then simply Playbill in 1957. 

The title font varied from issue to issue until it was standardized in ’57, and the current, distinct typeface appeared in about 1974, with the familiar yellow background having become standard the previous year.    Yellow was selected for the background to the logo because it was the cheapest color available.

Since 2000, variations occur to mark special occasions, such as a green banner replacing the yellow one in October 2008 for the fifth anniversary of Wicked (and again in 2018 for the 10th), or the rainbow banner in June for LGBTQ Pride Month, which debuted in 2014.

The contents of the original magazine changed weekly, which was also how often new plays commonly opened at each theater back then.  (The content of today’s Playbills, aside from the production details, changes monthly.)

When Playbill launched a subscription edition in 1982, the contents of the magazine delivered to subscribers’ homes was identical to the copies distributed at the theaters as far as the features and articles were concerned, but the production information was replaced with listings of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows and news from touring shows and the theater scene around the country and abroad.

Over the years, there have been various different regular features and columns in the magazine, such as “At This Theatre,” a column with historical information on the theater housing the production, “Ask Playbill,” which answers questions about theater from readers and playgoers, and a “Theatre Quiz.”

Most major New York theaters used Strauss’s program, but not all.  The Shubert Company (predecessor to the present-day Shubert Organization), the enterprise of the formidable “Shubert Brothers”—as Lee (1871-1953), Samuel S. (1878-1905), and Jacob J. Shubert (1879?-1963) were universally known collectively—for instance, insisted for many years on publishing its own programs.

In 1891, Strauss merged his company with his main competitor and, by 1905, had standardized the appearance of the program so that the layout, including the advertising space, was uniform.

After World War I ended in 1918, Strauss sold his company to his nephew, Richard M. Huber (ca. 1881-1965).  Strauss had made a great fortune from his enterprise, becoming a true entrepreneur and a leading member of New York City’s social elite.  

His New York Times obituary (as Frank V. Storrs, 9 March 1939) described him as “prominent in the field of theatrical advertising and active for many years in banking and at one time was the owner of a theatre chain.”  The Times added that “he had many financial interests outside the theatrical and advertising fields” and “also owned property in the midtown theatrical section of Manhattan.”

From 1918 onward, the company started printing playbills for all of Broadway and by 1924, Huber’s New York Theatre Program Corporation was printing 16,000,000 programs for over 60 theaters.  Thus began Playbill’s virtual monopoly on supplying theater program printing for New York City’s commercial theaters.

Although Frank Vance Strauss may have conceived the notion of the playbill magazine, Richard Huber gets the credit for starting the New York Theater Program Corporation.  The seeds of today’s Playbill were planted under Huber’s ownership.  The eventual iconic look and content of the magazine began to take shape under Huber. 

Under Huber’s leadership, the magazine gained the name The Playbill and short articles on fashion, automobiles, books, as well as interviews and even jokes were added to the program’s offerings.  The cover art was also standardized in the 1920s, featuring images representing the theater, which stayed the same from show to show.

Early in the 1930s, the artwork on the Playbill covers began to be show-specific, though the title of the production didn’t appear anywhere on the cover.  That first started to happen later in the decade.  By the mid-1940s, the show’s title began to appear above a production photo and the Playbill logo.

The artwork on the Playbill covers were black-and-white production photos until the late 1960s, when individualized cover art appeared, often drawings or graphic art—though they, too, were black and white.  Aside from the colored banner framing the Playbill logo, color wasn’t used for the cover art until after the turn of the 21st century.

In 1956, after 70 years as a Strauss family enterprise, Huber sold the magazine publisher to producer and real estate magnate Roger L. Stevens (1910-98), who in 1961 became the founding chairman (until 1988) of what became the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and then in 1965, the first chairman (through 1969) of what became the National Endowment for the Arts.  

Stevens changed the magazine’s name to just Playbill the year after he bought the company and no longer let a representation of the productions serve as the dominate image on the cover.  Instead, the cover design was nonspecific with the theater’s name and the play’s title inside the program.  The cover design for each theater didn’t change.

Protests from theatergoers caused Stevens to change his decision and Playbill’s colorful band across the top of the cover contained the show's information printed beneath the Playbill logo.  Eventually, the colored strip was standardized into the yellow band of today’s Playbill.

Gilman Kraft (1926-99), a publisher, bought the company in 1960 and hired Arthur T. Birsh (1933?-2021), a master printer, as the manager of the magazine’s printing plant; Kraft then sold it to the conglomerate Metromedia in 1968.  

Birsh worked his way up to president of the company under Kraft, but when Metromedia acquired Playbill, the media conglomerate liked the way Birsh handled the company’s business and kept him on as second-in-command at the corporate level.

When Metromedia and Playbill parted ways in 1973, Birsh left the media conglomerate and became Playbill’s sole owner.  Playbill’s current chief operations officer and vice president since 2016 is Alex Birsh (b. 1989), the third generation of his family to operate the program publisher; he’s the grandson of Arthur Birsh.  (Alex Birsh’s father, Phil Birsh, [b. 1958] is the current CEO and president, having succeeded his father in 1993.)

On the Eyewitness News broadcast on WABC on 22 October 2023, Playbill COO/V.P. Alex Birsh declared, "We truly are quite simply the brand of Broadway."  That’s arguably so in a certain sense, but there have been competitors and niche alternatives to Playbill.

Playbill almost exclusively concentrated on Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters, while Stagebill, founded in 1927, focused on concerts, opera, and dance.  By the late 1990s, Playbill was highly profitable while Stagebill wasn’t, so, to increase revenue, Stagebill entered Playbill’s territory.  The Public Theater and Disney contracted with Stagebill for their shows.  

Disney’s issue was control of advertising content.  Playbill relies on advertising revenue that’s entirely under its authority, but Disney’s policy prohibits the promotion of liquor and tobacco products on its property.  (Disney owns the New Amsterdam Theatre, where its Lion King was playing.)

In response, Playbill produced Showbill, a sister publication started around 1999 that conformed to Disney’s advertising restrictions.  With an alternative available, Disney switched from Stagebill to Showbill for The Lion King (1997-present).  Similar situations occurred at other Broadway theaters and productions.

Playbill also responded to Stagebill’s challenge by producing publications for classic arts houses, particularly venues that were once Stagebill clients, such as Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. 

For these venues, Playbill broke from its typical format and began publishing completely customized programs like Stagebill.  Because of this action and Stagebill’s continuing financial problems, it foundered and Playbill bought up the Stagebill trademark in 2002.  Thus ended the competition for Playbill’s hegemony.

In 1994, Playbill launched Playbill Online (https://playbill.com/) and has increased its digital offerings steadily, along with entries into other media, as the new century unfolded.  My interest here has been on the ink-and-paper publication, so I won’t detail this development.  Wikipedia has a run-down of Playbill’s expansion beyond hard-copy outlets, and I suggest interested ROTters check that out at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playbill#Other_media.

[Many people, including me, speak of Playbill as the concrete reminder of the evanescent theater experience once the curtain drops and the playgoer leaves the playhouse.  I admitted above that I have been keeping my programs, including those that aren’t Playbills, for the past 50 years, and that I wish that I’d kept them from earlier times.

[The fact is that I did keep my theater programs from my childhood playgoing—I just didn’t keep them permanently.  I brought them home, read them, looked at the pictures, and then sometimes used them for something.  Here’s a case in point:

[The first Broadway show I saw on Broadway (as opposed to pre-Broadway in Washington, D.C., or on the National Tour) was Fiorello!; the second one I saw was My Fair Lady.  That would make it 1959, ’60, or ’61—7th or 8th grade.

[In those years, my Washington middle school had a music class as a regular part of the curriculum and all the students kept a folder for our music sheets.  It was an ordinary manilla folder, and we were supposed to decorate it, presumably with something related to music.  

[The year I saw MFL, I cut up the Playbill and used the still photos from the show to decorate my music folder!  The Playbill’s cover photo, which was Liza (Julie Andrews, of course) sitting on the steps of Covent Garden, holding a bunch of flowers ("Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?"), was the center pic of my folder’s cover, with the other shots from the Playbill scattered around “randomly.”  I can still visualize it!  

[Now, here’s something I’d never put together before 2021: the chronology of this seminal experience:

[Since I would have made my folder at the start of the school year, and Fiorello! opened at the end of November 1959—early in my 7th-grade year—I probably saw it that Christmas vacation.  (I’d have turned 13 during that holiday.)  We must have gone back to New York City sometime later that school year, maybe spring break. (Both sets of my grandparents lived in NYC.)

[I suspect my family saw MFL then, since if we’d waited until Christmas of 8th grade, I would have used something else to make my music folder; I must have already had the Playbill when school started for 8th grade.  So I must have seen MFL whenever spring break was in 1960 and held onto the Playbill.

[That also means I saw Andrews in TV’s Cinderella before I saw her on stage.  I already knew who she was because of all the hype about her appearance in MFL (which had opened on 15 March 1956), but Cinderella was on TV in March 1957 (see “Cinderella: Impossible Things Are Happening (CBS-TV, 31 March 1957),” posted on ROT on 25 April 2013).]

Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement –

History of Native American Theater

[In my introduction to “‘Staging Our Native Nation’” on 24 March 2018, the start of a series of articles from American Theatre I reposted, I said that I was introduced to Native American theater by a script I read in 1996. In that same introduction, I confessed: 

I knew little about Native American theater before reading Serpent God and I’ve learned only a general outline of its appearance and development as part of the American theater scene since then, but I’ve felt that it’s a remarkable cultural phenomenon.

[What I did perceive from my limited exposure led me to formulate a sort of general characterization of the theater form devised by Indigenous American writers and directors.  In 2018, I wrote:

In a very real sense, native American theater artists have invented our first truly indigenous theater.  Mainstream American theater, including African-American drama, is pretty much an adoption of existing European theater forms; we merely put an American stamp on it.  Indigenous peoples have taken the basic form of Western theater (as well as the performance forms of other cultures, I presume), and adapted it to tell their stories and, what’s more, incorporate their techniques of storytelling, including traditional music, dance, and ritual.

[From what I’ve read on the field then and afterwards, my impression wasn’t far from the prevailing wisdom of the theater experts and academicians.  (What’s missing from the literature is the descriptive opinions of the Native practitioners—but I guess most of them are busy inventing their theater instead of writing about it.)

[(The play I read in 1996 was Call the Serpent God to Me by M. Elena Carrillo and I posted my script evaluation on Rick On Theater in “Two Script Reports” on 20 February 2020.  With my evaluation, I was required to write a letter to the playwright; here’s some of what I said to Carrillo:

Reading your script was a great pleasure!  The juxtaposition of Aztec, Catholic, and Tejano cultural elements provides a unique perspective that makes reading Serpent God a constant surprise and keeps the reader—and most likely, an audience—intrigued and rapt.  The incorporation of the images of Aztec gods, as well as the figures of Domitila’s Lamentation and Fernando’s Diablo [characters in the play and spirit figures who haunt them], gives the script a theatrical aspect that is also theatrically provocative.  The addition of appropriate music as you call for should make Serpent God a truly magical theatrical experience.  The only appropriate comparisons for this piece are non-Western: Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Kathakali—all highly theatrical, multi-disciplinary forms.)

[I won’t be going deeply into the structure or content of Native American drama.  There are lists of Indigenous dramatists and collections of Native plays, and the same is true of Native American theater troupes and companies that present Indigenous dramas.  I may reference them, but I won’t make my own list here.  I intend to lay out the progress of Native American theater, sticking pretty close to the historical outline.

[A note on usage: ROTters will note that “Staging Our Native Nation,” the American Theatre series on Native peoples’ theater, also covers the theatrical efforts of native Hawaiians and Inupiat (native Alaskans), and in those articles, the term “Native American” includes those peoples as well as American Indians.  For the purposes of this post, however, the terms Native American, Native, American Indian, Indian, Indigenous American, and Indigenous will all refer to the Indigenous peoples of North America—principally, the United States and Canada.  (If I need to make a distinction, I will say so specifically.)

[For this post, I relied heavily on Sidoní López and Hanane Benali’s “Native American Theater: A Concise History” from Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies v. 54 (July 2016).]

Although contemporary Native American theater emerged during the second half of the 20th century, its origins draw from an extensive oral tradition which was mainly based on Indian traditional storytelling.  Stories of all kinds about Native tribes and cultures were passed down from generation to generation for purposes of education, entertainment, and the preservation of the Native American cultural heritage. 

Most of these stories were performed and dramatized by Indian storytellers for their audiences, suggesting the first literary, historical, and cultural antecedents of contemporary Native American theater.  Most Indigenous American cultures didn’t have a written language before the arrival of the Europeans, so transmission was oral.

(Without recapping a detailed history of the writing systems of the Native peoples of the Americas, I’ll simply state that no indigenous writing system was known among North American Indians at the time of first European contact—neither the 11th century with the Vikings nor the 15th century with Columbus, et al.—unlike the Indians of Mesoamerica, who’d developed their own writing systems as early as the 3rd millennium BCE.  

(A number of writing systems for different North American Indian languages were developed in the early and mid-19th century as a result of the influence of European writing.  Several systems, based to one extent or another on the Latin alphabet, were invented and introduced by European and Euro-American missionaries, teachers, and linguists.)

When American Indian writing emerged, Native Americans went from telling stories to writing them down, using different literary forms, such as the novel, poetry, autobiography, and short story.  Indigenous drama, however, wasn’t part of Native writing during this period. 

Since ancient times, Native Americans have relied upon a diverse and vibrant oral tradition, often seen as oral literature.  This consisted of stories, accounts, tales, myths, legends, epic narratives, and songs about Indigenous cultures that were intended to educate and entertain members of the tribe, and to preserve its cultural traditions. 

When the tribal culture bearers told these stories, they were accompanied by songs, dances, music, pictographs, wampum (belts woven from beads used as a memory aid in oral tradition), and dramatic presentations.  Essentially, Native American storytelling consisted of a solo performer, without props or costumes, telling a story to an audience and passing down important cultural values and tribal histories through the generations.

Native storytellers practiced their art by giving life and voice to different tribal stories and by making use of certain theatrical elements such as distinct intonation patterns and rhythms, visual images, introductions to tales, word exaggeration, gestures, and body movements.  Handed down from generation to generation, these practices show the similarities and closeness to theater of the performance and dramatization of Native American oral storytelling traditions. 

(Several examples of Native American storytelling from various Indian nations are described in “Native American Theater: A Concise History” by Sidoní López and Hanane Benali, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies [Zaragoza, Spain: Univ. of Zaragoza, Dept. of English and German Philology] V. 54 [July 2016]: 94-96 [Native_American_theater_A_concise_history.pdf].)

The existence of storytelling and its performance in early Native American oral traditions and literature demonstrates that contemporary Native American theater comes from this tradition.  The Oneida/Chippewa playwright Bruce King (b. 1933) states that “theater is about storytelling,” whereas the American scholar and professor Christy Stanlake talks about the “close connection between Native American theatre and Native storytelling.”  

In the same line, the Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy (b. 1941) suggests that “story-telling in the oral tradition could be called an early form of theatre, a one-character play.  [It’s probably more accurate to call storytelling a one-actor play, since the storyteller may personate many characters.]  The action or plot was the voice telling the story that was integral for survival.” 

It wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that Native American playwrights and Indigenous theater companies started to write and produce Native plays, leading to the emergence of contemporary Native American drama. 

The proliferation of Native plays has continued into the 21st century with academic study starting to be conspicuous in the field, paving the way for the consolidation of a diverse, vibrant, and evolving genre that continues to expand, making itself more available to both Native and non-Native audiences.

While it seems accurate to label these traditional tales and stories as early forms of Native theater, the notion of considering or categorizing them as theater is debatable.  Although many Native playwrights assert that storytelling is a central element of their dramaturgy, they don’t categorize or define storytelling as theater per se. 

Storytelling’s a venerable art form of its own, but in itself, it’s not theater.  It’s a different art the way ballet is different.  Critics and scholars agree that there are similarities between storytelling and theater, but they also point out fundamental differences that set them apart.  So, to be precise, it’s more accurate to see telling stories as the antecedent of contemporary Native American theater.

According to Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller in their introductory survey in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993), there were proto-theatrical performances in the Americas before Columbus.  The Spanish found “Aztec performances in Mexico that blended song, dance, comic byplay, and animal imitations.”

In North America, Native tribes performed multifaceted rituals with decided performative elements with complex stage effects, masking, magic tricks, and clowning, along with singing or chanting and dancing.  The performances Indigenous peoples of the Southwest and in Canada were even more elaborate and by the early 16th century in New Spain were acted in Spanish and by the 17th century, in French in Quebec.

The dramatic presentation of the American Natives, unlike that of their Western counterparts, were “charged with cosmic significance that sets it apart from events in the ordinary world, and the ‘audience’ are participants rather than passive spectators.”  The Native American theatrical landscape was diverse, covering a wide range of forms.

When Native American writing emerged in the 18th century, Indian authors began to produce and compose a wide range of literature in English.  They started to write about their own stories in a diverse and expanding literary field, including novels, poetry, autobiographies and short stories.  However, Native theater was not being published and thus became the only main literary form that didn’t appear among the surge of Native American literature in print starting in the late 18th century.

(Samson Occom [Mohegan; 1723-92] was a Christian preacher who published his autobiography, A Short Narrative of My Life, in 1768.  William Apess [Pequot; 1798-1839] saw his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, in print in 1829.  In 1883, Sarah Winnemucca [Paiute; 1844-91] wrote about her tribe’s first interactions with European Americans in Life Among the Paiutes, and in 1854, John Rollin Ridge [Cherokee; 1827-67] published what’s considered the first novel by a Native American, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, about a Mexican figure of disputed historicity, 1829-53, called “the Robin Hood of the West” or “the Robin Hood of El Dorado.”)

Among the reasons for the dearth of Native plays during the period of European settlement are colonialism itself.  Most of the Native American languages, traditions, customs, rituals, ceremonies, and religions were suppressed. 

Entire nations were destroyed, along with them, their culture, language, history, philosophies and religions, and arts.  The loss of tribal lands, forced resettlement, and confinement to reservations left them without a sense of belonging, which was the basis of much of the Native peoples’ literature, oral or written.

The dominance of the Western culture suppressed, both intentionally and circumstantially, the Indigenous lifestyle, making the Indians strangers in their own land, the foundation of much of their beliefs and their art.  As Western consumerism and capitalism came to dominate the Americas, and poverty in this unfamiliar economic environment overtook the American Natives, time and inclination to make art was supplanted by the need to subsist and survive.  The development of Native American theater was suppressed for more than two centuries. 

The Indigenous writer, video producer, storyteller, popular theater worker, and actor Cat Cayuga (Onandaga/Mohawk Nation) points out that “when the first colonists arrived they considered our art forms crude and primitive.  They had the idea that no form of Native Theater existed prior to the ‘discovery.’  It is this attitude which has made the development of our art difficult for us.  The dominant society has always used its own terms to define art.” 

During the first years of the 20th century, there was no publication or production of Native American plays, but there were some Native American theatrical performances based on traditional storytelling, which again could be considered as being among the antecedents or predecessors of contemporary Native American theater. 

The effects of colonialism explain the relegation of Native theatrical traditions to the fields of anthropology, religious studies, and ethnology.  Consequently, Native performance traditions weren’t explored as theater, and treating them as products of other disciplines contributed to the silencing and displacement of Native theater until the 20th century.  

The only drama possibly written by a Native American author before 1900 is Wep-ton-no-mah, The Indian Mail Carrier by Go-won-go Mohawk (1859-1924), a Seneca playwright and actor, and Charles W. Charles, her husband, who served as a captain with George Armstrong Custer.  Wep-ton-no-mah was first performed in Liverpool, England, in April 1893, and became incredibly popular.  A copy of the script is held by the Library of Congress and has been digitized.

As the new century dawned, Te Ata’s one-woman performances of Native American traditional stories and legends made use of Indian props, such as a drum, a bow and arrow, and an Indian costume.  Although Mary “Te Ata” Thompson Fisher (1895-1995; Choctaw Nation) had difficulties as a Native American performer, her career went on for over 70 years.  She educated Euro-American audiences about Native America by presenting accurate information about Native cultures and Indian storytelling was again performed and dramatized.

It wasn’t until the end of the century’s first third that Native American plays were produced in professional mainstream houses.  Rollie Lynn Riggs, a Native playwright of Cherokee origin, wrote Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), the play on which Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II based their musical Oklahoma! (1943), but Riggs (known professionally as Lynn) first saw his Big Lake and Roadside staged on Broadway (1927 and 1930, respectively).

Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night was staged in 1932 at the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.  It’s a theatrical piece offering a portrayal of Native life in eastern Oklahoma during the 1920s, but Broadway producers said that New York audiences weren’t ready for the non-chronological, episodic play. 

Although the author gained nationwide popularity with his plays—he had three other plays (not counting Oklahoma!) on Broadway after Roadside—he often neglected to point out his Indian heritage, which was not generally known. 

The rise of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and 1970s contributed to a reawakening of Native cultures since it appeared as a movement in which minorities and the societally marginalized demanded an end to discrimination and the right to speak for themselves.  In addition, there were a series of social and political incidents that helped increase and renew Native American cultural and ethnic pride.  

This period of social and political upheavals is widely known as the Red Power period and includes major events such as the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay on 20 November 1969, the so-called Trail of Broken Treaties from 6 October to 3 November 1972, the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington D.C. from 3 to 9 November 1972, and The Longest Walk across the United States from 11 February to 15 July 1978 (3,200 miles).

Within this context of self-expression, social and political movements in favor of Native American cultural traditions, performances and ethnic renewal, a period of literary brilliance for Native literature emerged under the name of the Native American Renaissance, a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln (1983) that refers mainly to the literary works following N. Scott Momaday’s (1934-2024; Kiowa) 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn (1968). 

During this literary period, indigenous writers were not only telling their stories in novels, autobiographies, poetry and short stories, but also bringing their storytelling and performing traditions to the stage through the writing and production of various contemporary plays.

When these contemporary Native plays started to be written during the 1960s and 1970s, many of them were performed and produced for and by various Native American theater companies.  Since their emergence in the 1960s, these Native drama companies have been relevant to the development of contemporary Native American theater, having promoted and produced numerous theatrical works by Native dramatists in the United States. 

The first to form Native companies with indigenous actors was Arthur Junaluska (1912-78; Cherokee) in New York during the 1950s.  One decade later, Jay Silverheels (1912-80; Mohawk), George Pierre, Noble ‘Kid’ Chissell (1905-87) and others created the Indian Actor’s Workshop in Los Angeles, a company intended to coach Indian actors to work in film while also staging some productions. 

In addition, the foundation of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, during the 1960s is also considered one of the earliest and most significant contributors to Native American drama.  The IAIA “sought to balance the education of students with training in both Native American and European theatrical forms, and was dedicated to developing a contemporary Indian Theater which has meaning to contemporary Indians.“

The Institute of American Indian Arts also created an amphitheater for the performance and representation of plays, such as Monica Charles’s Mowitch (1968), a play about Indian Shakers, and Bruce King’s Evening at the Warbonnet (1989), which deals with political issues, especially those related to the American Indian Movement.

Several years later, in 1972, the American Indian Theater Ensemble was founded by the Kiowa/Delaware dramatist Hanay Geiogamah (b. 1945) in New York City with the help of Ellen Stewart (1919-2011) of La MaMa Experimental Theater Club.  Later known as the Native American Theater Ensemble (NATE), this Native theater company was founded upon Geiogamah’s belief that “plays for and about Indians, their past, their despairing present, their hopes and dreams and daily lives, presented by Indian artists could be of inestimable value in uniting and uplifting the 850.000 Indian people in the United States.”

One of the most prolific Native playwrights and a crucial figure in the history of contemporary Native American drama, Geiogamah created the first all-Indian repertory company, which produced his first play Body Indian (1972).  Dealing with the problem of alcoholism and self-destructiveness among Native Americans, Body Indian became the most highly acclaimed of Geiogamah’s theatrical pieces and was later included in the first collection of Native plays, New Native American Drama: Three Plays (1980). 

This collection also contains Geiogamah’s Foghorn (1973), a play dealing with Indian stereotypes, and 49 (1975), a theatrical piece that provides a blend of contemporary and traditional elements in Native American cultures.  Both plays were performed and produced by NATE along with Robert Shorty’s and Geraldine Keams’s (b. 1951; Navajo Nation) Na Haaz Zaan (1972), focusing on the Navajo myth of creation; Geiogamah’s monologues Grandma (1984) and Grandpa (1984); and Bruce King’s ghost story Whispers from the Other Side (1985).

By the mid-1970s, the Kuna/Rappahannock Muriel Miguel founded the Spiderwoman Theater, a feminist theater company which recruited various groups of women from different ethnic backgrounds and that mainly intended to promote and foster Native women’s contribution to Native American theater. 

Based on the story-weaving technique, which “combines the philosophies and styles of feminist theater with a traditional understanding of the power of storytelling and oral history,” Spiderwoman Theater in New York City created and produced several plays that combined traditional Native storytelling with the procedures of contemporary Western theater.  Examples of these plays include Women in Violence (1977), The Three Sisters from Here to There (1982), Reverb-ber-ber-rations (1991) and Power Pipes (1992), which mainly focused on gender issues, oppression, poverty, racism and violence.

By the 1980s, the Colorado sisters of Mexican-Indian ancestry created the Coatlicue Theater Company at the American Indian Community House in New York City.  Taking inspiration from Spiderwoman Theater, Elvira (1931-2016) and Hortensia Colorado (Chichimec/Otomi) wrote and produced plays that bridged both traditional and contemporary stories. 

These plays include 1992: Blood Speaks, which deals with the significant role that Christianity played in the oppression of Native Americans, and A Traditional Kind of Woman: Too Much, Not ‘Nuff, a play that centers on the stories and experiences of Native women as they struggle with issues such as alcoholism, violence, and rape.

In the 1990s several other Native American theater companies emerged in response to the needs of individual playwrights.  Such is the case of the Red Eagle Soaring Theatre Group, which was founded in Seattle in 1990 and aimed particularly at advising young Indians about AIDS and other current issues.  Another troupe is the Red Path Theater Company in Chicago, which was founded around 1995 and produced plays mainly focused on contemporary American Indian urban life.

Alongside these Native theater companies, there were also festivals of Native American plays.  The Native Voices Festival was first held at Illinois State University in Normal in 1994, becoming the resident theater company at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles in 1999.  In the following years, Native Voices hosted festivals developing and producing plays by Native American writers from both the United States and Canada. 

In addition, one of the most important initiatives in Native American theater was the creation in 1996 of Project HOOP (Honoring Our Origins and People Through Native American Theater), which emerged as “a national, multi-disciplinary initiative to advance Native theater artistically, academically, and professionally.” 

Project Hoop aims at “establish[ing] Native theater as an integrated subject of study and creative development in tribal colleges, Native communities, K-12 schools, and mainstream institutions, based on Native perspectives, traditions, views of spirituality, histories, cultures, languages, communities, and lands.”  

The emergence of all these Native American theater companies, the celebration of festivals, and initiatives in Native American drama helped promote the great proliferation of Native plays across the United States.  There are currently over 250 published and far over 600 unpublished plays by some 250 Native American and First Nations (the Canadian designation for its Indigenous population) playwrights and theater groups in North America. 

In the wake of this diversity and proliferation of Native American plays came a considerable body of scholarship in the field that started to be noticed at the beginning of the 21st century.  The first book of essays on Native American theater appeared in 2000, published and co-edited by Hanay Geiogamah and Jaye T. Darby under the title American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader.  This book represents the first step towards the development of Native American theater as a field of study. 

The Geiogamah-Darby collection was followed by Birgit Dawes’s Native North American Theater in a Global Age: Sites of Identity Construction and Transdifference (2007), a monograph that addresses the most relevant theoretical aspects of contemporary Native North American theater, including an historical overview of the genre, its categorization and definition, the controversies about its geographical, political, and cultural boundaries, while also providing in-depth analyses of 25 plays by playwrights both Native American and First Nations. 

Contemporary Native American theater has been promoted not only by the availability of plays in publication and scholarship in the field, but also by various institutions.  Such is the case of New York City’s Public Theater, an institution that has been active in this promotion through the celebration of an annual Native Theater Festival in which the works of Native playwrights, actors, directors, and musicians are highlighted as part of the Native Theater Initiative initiated in 2007. 

Similarly, OKC Theatre Company in Oklahoma City launched an annual Native American Play Festival in 2010, offering Native playwrights the opportunity to submit new plays, from which some are chosen for staged readings and one is produced and given a two-week run.  That festival is now housed at the Oklahoma Indigenous Theatre Company on the campus of the University of Central Oklahoma. 

In addition, Native Voices at the Autry, America’s leading Native theater company devoted exclusively to developing the work of both emergent and established Native playwrights, continues to offer an annual venue for the stage, production and performance of Native American plays.

[Native American plays have been included in several collections and anthologies.  Among such works are Hanay Geiogamah’s New Native American Drama: Three Plays (1980); The Institute of American Indian Art provides three plays written by its own students in Gathering Our Own: A Collection of IAIA Student Playwrights (1996); and Diane Glancy’s War Cries: Plays by Diane Glancy (1997) offers nine plays, which combine both a vision of contemporary life and traditional aspects that connect Indians with their past. 

[Two anthologies appeared in 1999: Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, which includes five theatrical pieces by Native American authors, one play by a Native Hawaiian dramatist, and another play by a First Nation (Canadian Indigenous peoples) playwright; and Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays, which contains eleven plays by Native American dramatists.

[In 2003, the first anthology of Native women’s plays was published under the title Keepers of the Morning Star: An Anthology of Native Women’s Theater.  This was followed by another anthology, entitled Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English (2003), which was the first collection to be published in Canada. 

[In 2009, the second volume of Staging Coyote’s Dream was published, including seven plays by Native Canadian playwrights and one theatrical piece by Spiderwoman Theater’s founder, Muriel Miguel, and another play published by her daughter, Murielle Borst.

[The Native American Women Playwrights Archive also brought out some anthologies during the 2000s.  Footpaths and Bridges: Voices from the Native American Women Playwrights Archive was published in 2008, the second collection of Native plays by indigenous women in the United States and Canada—including a play by a Native Hawaiian dramatist as well. 

[The NAWPA 2007 conference “Honoring Spiderwoman Theater/Celebrating Native American Theater” also generated the publication of another anthology entitled Performing Worlds into Being: Native American Women’s Theater (2009), containing several plays, interviews, production histories and academic articles.

[Several authors saw their works published not only in these anthologies but also in individual collections of Native American plays:¨William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s Where the Pavement Ends: Five Native American Plays (2001), which combines stories of the hard lives and experiences of Native Americans in Fort Peck Indian Reservation with comic relief, in matters dealing with Native identity, tradition, and oppression; E. Donald Two-Rivers’s Brief-Case Warriors: Stories for the Stage (2001) offers a series of plays focusing on the contemporary lives of urban Indians who are especially concerned with their survival from alcohol problems and discrimination. 

[Occasionally alternating between prose and poetry, Diane Glancy’s American Gypsy: Six Native American Plays (2002) contains different plays with a great poetic sense that include traditional and contemporary stories about Native Americans, while being mainly concerned with themes of gender, acculturation, survival, generational relationships, and the tensions and confrontations between Native American traditional values and white American values, customs, and religious beliefs. 

[Equally important to note is Bruce King’s Evening at the Warbonnet and Other Plays (2006), an individual collection of plays that includes great moral content and a sense that the characters are struggling between good and evil.  In addition, King offers a combination of traditional and contemporary elements such as humor, music, debate, histories, and experiences, which take the reader on an impressive journey through Native cultures.

[In addition, Alexander Street Press’s North American Indian Drama, a collection of digital plays which contains more than 250 plays by both Native American and First Nations playwrights is another resource for theater by Indigenous Americans.  The collection starts in the 1930s with Lynn Riggs’s first Native American plays to be published and produced in the United States, and progresses through the 20th century.]

Superheroes on Native Land: Supplement –

Biography of Larissa FastHorse 

[After “‘Superheroes on Native Land,’” Part 3 on 27 January, I promised to compose a biographical sketch of Larissa FastHorse, the Native American writer who created Wicoun, the play at the center of Todd London’s American Theatre account.  Well, here it is.  I hope it will introduce readers of Rick On Theater to this special artist.

[My original idea was to do a short bio and pair it with a brief history of Native American theater and post one supplement to London’s three-part chronicle.  It turned out that there’s more to say about FastHorse than I had anticipated, so her biography ended up longer than I figured.  The upshot is that I’m posting the bio on its own first, and will post a second supplement with the history of the theater form a few days afterward.

[To be honest, I’m not being entirely accurate when I say that FastHorse was more interesting than I anticipated.  I thought she would be, but in a cursory look for biographical coverage, it seemed that the material I could draw on would be minimal and I wouldn’t find enough to be more than superficial.  That was what turned out to be wrong.  I found more detail than I had feared, and was able to say more than I anticipated.  ROTters are the beneficiaries.]

Larissa FastHorse (b. 1971; Sicangu Lakota Nation) was born in San Francisco, but didn’t stay there long.  She explains that her birth mother, who was of Norwegian extraction, was from the Bay city—FastHorse makes a clear distinction between her “birth parents” and her “parents” who adopted her, as we’ll see—but after her birth parents broke up, her birth father took her back to South Dakota—and that’s where she grew up.  She says she didn’t know her birth mother until she was an adult.

When she and her birth father, a full-blooded Lakota who lived on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, returned to South Dakota, her birth father wasn’t able to care for her by the time she was 11 months old.  He asked Edmund and Rhoda Baer, a childless older couple Larissa’s birth father knew in the neighboring town of Winner, just off the reservation, to take care of his daughter.  The Baers, who adopted Larissa, became her Hunka family.  She explains what this means among Lakota people:

In the Lakota culture it’s one of our seven sacred rights.  It’s called “the making of relatives.”  Everybody has a family by birth, obviously, but a family by choice is something rare and special, and if you are blessed to get a family by choice, somewhere in your life, which can happen at any time, if you find that, then you take them on and put them above your biological family.  You are considered especially blessed because you found a Hunka family.  And so that’s what I was given at 11 months old, my Hunka parents, which are my parents.

I find this significant with respect to how FastHorse feels about her playwriting and, specifically, the work she has done with the Cornerstone Theater Company as recorded in the foregoing three-part report, “Superheroes on Native Land” by Todd London (21, 24, and 27 January 2024).                                     

When the Wicoun project was winding down and FastHorse and the play’s director were reviewing the accomplishment, FastHorse noted that the end result of the work wasn’t a boost to her career—the only people who saw Wicoun were Lakota people in the plains of South Dakota—but the effect that it had on her community, the people from whom she came.

It’s not trying to be anything but community-serving.  This is the stuff that makes me the happiest.  It fulfills me the most.  Also I feel like it’s actually doing some kind of real good in the world—as much as you can with theatre.

This, it seems to me, is also “making relatives.”

(FastHorse is the dramatist’s birth father’s name.  She explained how Lakota family names came to be at the instigation of the European settler government because Lakota people traditionally didn’t have family names.  The story’s in an interview with Tim Sanford of Playwrights Horizons at Artist Interview: Larissa FastHorse - Trailers + More : Playwrights Horizons.)

FastHorse grew up as an only child in a lower-middle-class home.  Her FastHorse relatives, she said, were “pretty notorious in a lot of negative ways,” so, in order for her to grow up free of the negative associations, her adoptive father took a job in Pierre (pronounced peer), the state capital, 100 miles from the reservation. 

FastHorse had a congenital malformation of her lower legs.  An orthopedist prescribed physical therapy and recommended several activities to accomplish this.  Pierre being a small city (population under 12,000 in 1980), the choices were limited, so the Baers put their adopted daughter in ballet class.  A “really intense tomboy,” FastHorse hated it.

She started as an 8-year-old second-grader, five years older than the three-year-olds who were her classmates, and said it was hard and painful for her.  She improved, however, and by fifth grade, she was doing well in ballet.  That year, her aunt have her “one of those chick empowerment books” on successful women.

Maria Tallchief was in there and I saw that she was half Native American, half white, and she’s from the middle of nowhere Oklahoma, and she became America’s leading prima ballerina.  And I was like, “That’s me, obviously!  (Laughs.)  That’s what I’m gonna do.”  And I remember my parents being like “Okay, great.”

(Maria Tallchief [1925-2013] was born in Fairfax, Oklahoma, a town of about 1,700 residents in 1925.  The town is on the Osage Nation Reservation and Tallchief’s father was a member of that tribe.  Her mother was of Scottish-Irish descent.

(A serious dance student from the age of three, when Tallchief was eight, her family relocated to Los Angeles.  She moved to New York City at 17 to find a spot with a dance company.  She spent five years with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and then met George Balanchine.  He launched what became the New York City Ballet in 1946 and Tallchief became its first star. 

(She became world famous, performing all over the globe with the world’s premier companies.  She was considered America’s first important prima ballerina.  She retired in 1966, having collected the top honors of her profession and beyond.)

Ballet, FastHorse noted, was the first thing she wasn’t good at and so it was the first thing she enjoyed.  “I had to work at it,” she explained, “and that’s what I love about it.”  I think this response, too, is telling: she loves a challenge.  She was headed for a career as a professional dancer.

At 19. FastHorse became a dancer with the Atlanta Ballet, her first contract.  She left quickly because, she explained, she met sculptor Edd Hogan, who would become her husband.  He was based in Los Angeles, so she moved back to California and danced with all the companies in L.A. for 10 years.

FastHorse adored dancing, but she suffered frequent injuries because of the problem with her legs.  But she’s a performer, so she worked consistently when dancers who were better couldn’t, because people wanted to watch her on stage and, she asserted, “that’s what I know how to do well.”

She had to face a choice, however: either surgery or quit.  “I didn’t want to hobble out over years of surgery and maybe it works maybe it doesn’t, and I’m like ugh.  Stop while you’re ahead.”

Well first I thought, like many dancers, that I’d do musical theater.  I did a musical in Europe, a horrible musical, that I had a principal role in.  I got the best possible experience because it was a super popular musical.  I toured for a year and hated it.

The show was very successful and FastHorse brought her husband to Europe while she toured for a year.  But she couldn't stand doing the same part in the show time after time for months on end.  In ballet, she pointed out, the troupe did different pieces and started new ballets every couple of months.  “Artistically, I was just so depressed and felt like I worked in a factory,” she complained.

The future dramatist tried teaching ballet next, which she did for a year.  She wasn’t ready to put performing aside for teaching.  “I’m way too selfish to be a teacher,” she confessed.  So, while endeavoring to become a dance teacher, FastHorse tried acting in L.A., principally in film, but she found

just the whole world of that is just not me.  You know that endlessly presentational selling yourself thing.  You can’t possibly go to the grocery store without your hair and make-up done because you could meet the director that’s going to change your life and needing to be at parties, and that’s just not me at all.

At 30, she retired from dancing and found script writing.  When she was auditioning for acting roles, she’d found it hard to get scenes and monologues.  Because she wasn’t “a theater kid,” she didn’t know where to find audition pieces; so, she wrote her own.  

When the people hearing the auditions asked FastHorse what her audition pieces were from, she’d say, “Oh.  It’s from this play I found.”  Then she realized, “Oh!  I can do this.  I can write this format.”  She made up a film-writing program from which she’d “graduated”—"Hollywood is the one place where lying your way in makes you even better.  They’re like, ‘Amazing!  That’s the best story ever’”—and got a paid internship at Universal Pictures. 

While at Universal, FastHorse wrote TV pilots for Fox and TeenNick (none seem to have aired) and got into the Sundance Native Film Program; her first film was shown at Sundance and other film festivals (though I haven’t been able to identify it).  She went from Universal to Paramount Pictures, but left that for writing for TV, then left that too because she “hated it.”  She proclaims that “the whole point of television is that it was created as a glorified commercial to sell products.”

Then, in 2007, Peter Brosius, artistic director of the Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis, asked FastHorse to write a Theatre for Young Audiences play.  He then produced her first play, Average Family.  That event started the novice writer on her present career track.

Before Average Family was even produced, FastHorse had three more commissions: The Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles, and History Project Los Angeles.  “I jumped into theater hard and fast,” she declares.  At first it was TYA commissions, but after a few years, FastHorse moved into adult fare.

I think the incipient playwright’s venture into writing for children is another significant development in FastHorse’s artistic foundation, beside her devotion to family and community, and her love of a challenge.  We see these all play out in the kind of work she’s done with groups like Cornerstone, as described by Todd London.

“I love writing for intergenerational audiences,” she says, “which is very much part of my culture, that we live in intergenerational families.  I try to write things that people can come to together.” 

FastHorse’s first “adult” play was Cherokee Family Reunion, July and August 2012 at the Mountainside Theatre, the 2,800-seat amphitheater in Cherokee, North Carolina.  (That’s where Unto These Hills, the outdoor pageant play that the playwright choreographed from 2008 to 2011, has run for 73 years.)  That was followed by Landless, presented by the Alter Theatre in January and February 2015, first in its hometown of San Rafael in Marin County, California, and then in San Franciso.

FastHorse figures she started writing plays in 2006 and has been doing it full time, without a bread-and-butter job as backup, since 2010.  Last spring, she became the first known Native woman writer to have a play produced on Broadway: The Thanksgiving Play presented by New York’s Second Stage Theater at the Hayes Theater, 20 April-11 June 2023.

(I found it curious that FastHorse is always labeled “the first known Native American woman playwright to have a play on Broadway.”  Every reference includes “known” and “woman” or “female.”

(The “known” equivocation, I can understand.  Records for that sort of detail were pretty thin, especially before, say, World War II or the ’50s/’60s.  Politics and prejudice being what they were—and are—people were often loath to identify themselves in those kinds of respects.

(But if she’s the first Native American woman writer on Broadway, that suggests there was a male playwright before her on the Great White Way some time.  I was curious, and I came across only one mention of a possible Native male writer with a Broadway connection.

(I recognized the name . . . but I didn’t know it was a man or a Native American: Lynn Riggs, who wrote the play Green Grow the Lilacs, which was musicalized in 1943 as Oklahoma!  I always thought Lynn Riggs [Claremore, Oklahoma; 1899-1954] was a woman!

(Riggs received no credit as a book-writer for Oklahoma! at the time, but, of course, before the musical was conceived, Lilacs played Broadway in 1931.  Riggs’s first play on Broadway was Big Lake, presented by the American Laboratory Theatre in 1927, so, even if his Native heritage wasn’t publicized—he was part Cherokee and his tribal allotment subsidized his writing—he was the first “known” American Indian writer to have a play presented on Broadway.)​

The Thanksgiving Play was written in 2015 and had its world première in that year at the Artists Repertory in Portland, Oregon.  The play made its New York première in 2018 Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons and went on to become one of the most produced plays in the U.S., finding homes at universities, community theaters, and regional groups.  FastHorse was the first Indigenous writer at Playwrights Horizons, and is the first Native American playwright in the history of American theater on the most-produced list. 

In recent years, FastHorse created a trilogy of community-engaged plays with Cornerstone Theater Company (see Parts 1-3 of “‘Superheroes on Native Land’”).  The first project was Urban Rez (2015), the second, Native Nation (2019), was the largest Indigenous theater production in the history of American theater with over 400 Native artists involved in the productions in association with Arizona State University’s arts center, Gammage.  The final project, Wicoun, is set in FastHorse’s homeland of South Dakota, where it went on a year-long tour. 

The writer’s other produced plays include What Would Crazy Horse Do? (Kansas City Repertory Theatre), Landless and Cow Pie Bingo (Alter Theater), Average Family (Children’s Theater Company), Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: a Class Presentation (Native Voices at the Autry, Autry Museum of the American West, L.A.), Vanishing Point (Eagle Project, Marymount Manhattan College, N.Y.C.), and Cherokee Family Reunion (Mountainside Theater).

Additional theaters that have commissioned or developed plays with FastHorse include the Public Theater in New York City, Yale Repertory Theatre, Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Geffen Playhouse at UCLA, Kennedy Center Theatre for Young Audiences in Washington, D.C., Baltimore’s Center Stage, Arizona Theater Company in Tucson and Phoenix, Mixed Blood Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Perseverance Theater Company in Juneau, Playwrights Week at the Lark in N.Y.C., the Center Theatre Group Writer’s Workshop at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, and Berkeley (California) Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor. 

The playwright’s a 2020 MacArthur Fellow; award-winning writer/choreographer; and co-founder of Indigenous Direction, the nation’s leading consulting company for Indigenous arts and audiences.  Along with partner Ty Defoe, their clients include Roundabout Theater Company, American Association of Arts Presenters, Western Arts Alliance, Guthrie Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Brown University, and many more.  Their groundbreaking work is redefining Indigenous art representation and education in America.

In 2020, Indigenous Direction produced the first land acknowledgement on national television for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC.  A land acknowledgement is a formal statement that acknowledges the original Indigenous Peoples of the land, spoken at the beginning of public events.  The custom is a tradition that dates back centuries in many Indigenous cultures.

The land acknowledgement featured in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade consisted of a Wampanoag blessing and a traditional rattle song, featuring Indigenous Ambassadors from the Northeast region.  The presentation acknowledged the Lenape territory of Manahatta (the original name of Manhattan).

Her inclusion process with Indigenous tribes has been honored with the most prestigious national arts funding from the MacArthur Fellows Program, Creative Capital, MAP Fund, NEFA (New England Foundation for the Arts), First People’s Fund, the NEA Our Town Grant, Mellon Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and others.

In 2019, FastHorse entered the film and television sectors with a series at Freeform, a movie for Disney Channel, and a special for NBC.  She has developed projects with Apple TV, Taylor Made Productions, and Echo Lake.   

The Native artist’s other awards include the PEN/Laura Pels Theater Award for an American Playwright, NEA Distinguished New Play Development Grant, Joe Dowling Annamaghkerrig Fellowship, American Alliance for Theatre & Education Distinguished Play Award, Inge Residency, Sundance/Ford Foundation Fellowship, Aurand Harris Fellowship, and the UCLA Native American Program Woman of the Year.  She was vice chair of the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group.  

FastHorse is represented by Jonathan Mills at Paradigm NY and her plays are published by Samuel French and the Dramatic Publishing Company.  She lives in Santa Monica, California (16 miles west of L.A.), with her husband, Edd Hogan.

[I remarked on Larissa FastHorse’s focus on “community” in her life and work.  For the playwright, community means her family, the Lakota people, and the Indigenous people of American and around the world.  She focuses her plays on the lives, traditions, and customs of her Lakota extended family, explaining, revealing, and demonstrating them to us outsiders.

[This brings up a dichotomy in FastHorse’s writing.  Does she see herself as an educator or an artist?  Are the two perspectives compatible or contradictory?  In the Playwrights Horizons interview, she says: “I think of my artwork as art first.  I use my work specifically to fulfill these artistic visions and ideas that I have.  But always there’s this parallel, indigenous part of me that is using the art to infiltrate and open the door.”

[While she fervently wants “to create an artistically satisfying experience” with her writing, at the same time, she asserts:

In Lakota culture every action we do today, we have to always be thinking seven generations ahead.  Right now I’m the first Indigenous person to be in this theater.  Seven generations from now, I hope that there are indigenous writers walking in and out of this theater not even thinking about the fact that they are indigenous because it is so common and normal for them to be here.

[Through her plays, she’s inculcating not only what makes us different and special, but what’s universal and makes us fundamentally the same.  And she’s teaching this to both her Native kin, as well as to the rest of us who don’t know or misunderstand the truths FastHorse is trying to reveal.

[On top of that, the dramatist acknowledges that there’s a political side to her work.  Los Angeles radio host John Horn asserted on LAist’s The Frame that “the job title that probably best describes her is ‘theatrical activist.’”

For me – there’s this whole side of talking about me artistically, but there’s this parallel side of me that’s a member of the Lakota nation, right?  So everything I do is in relationship to that.  Everything I was trying to do with TV shows or indigenous characters and social justice work through television, was watered down so much.  And by the time we got the fifteen notes and the sponsor and the worry and the product placement, it was just sad.

[FastHorse’s response to a question about her 2016 play What Would Crazy Horse Do? (première, 2017 at Kansas City Rep) reveals this aspect of her artistic persona.  The play’s about two contemporary Native Americans who are facing the extinction of their tribe just as the first female leader of the KKK is poised to introduce a gentler version of the Klan.  When the two groups are brought together, they find that sometimes they are asking the same questions.  FastHorse observes:

. . . What Would Crazy Horse Do? is very much the rage side of me that is always lying below the surface but that I keep contained.  I’m always ready to go off on something and I’m always trying to keep that down to a certain level.

[All of this comes together in what the Native theater artist sees her position in the American theater to be.  She explains:

. . . I’ve realized that—well, being Indigenous, but having this white family, being middle-class, but dancing in this aristocratic art form, doing all these things—my gift and burden is that I’m a bridge.  I know how to bridge cultures.  I know how to code switch like nobody.  And I know how to make those two sides understand each other. . . .  I operate in that space in a different way where I’m learning how to keep a very strong lid on my rage and express it differently in that room and people hear me.  Same with work on stage. I’ve been given, for whatever reason, these opportunities.  So I have an obligation to continue to get myself in those rooms and be seen as—as some people might say “the good Native.”  The one who isn’t offensive, the one who isn’t scary.  The one that’s not going to flip out.  The good one that we can have in the room.  Because then I can slowly keep opening the door and I get new people in the room.  I’m going to be pointed, I’m not going to let people off the hook, but I’m not going to completely alienate them.  I try to give people a way forward to be better people.  And so, all of what I do is very strategic in the way I present myself in the world, in the way I move through this larger theatrical space that I’m in.

[FastHorse’s conclusion returns to The Thanksgiving Play.  It’s a script calculated to make it easy for a standard American theater troupe to produce: four characters, all white (so the company doesn’t have to find Indigenous actors), one room, and a topic with which all Americans are innately familiar: Thanksgiving and its origin myth.

[I think all of us, once we’re old enough to know that Santa Claus isn’t real and that the Tooth Fairy didn’t really leave that quarter you found under your pillow when you lost a tooth, know the Pilgrims-and-Indians story is a myth.  All of us may, though, not know how damaging the myth can be.  So, FastHorse proffers this challenge: “‘American Theater, if you can’t do this, then you really don’t want to work with a Native artist and you don’t want to work with Native issues.’  Then it’s clear.  Then we’re dealing with a different issue with open prejudice as opposed to laziness, which I think is what we’ve been dealing with up until now.”

[For ROTters who are looking for my promised history of Native American theater, my plan now is to compile that post for publication on Friday. 2 February.  I hope readers will come back to this blog then for the completion of this extended series.]