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.]