A Lakota Playwright’s Take on Thanksgiving; Plus, Ayelet Waldman on Quilting to Stay Sane

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Speaker 4 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

Speaker 5 Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Speaker 3 I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 5 The Thanksgiving play is a play about the making of a play. It's also a very timely comedy about an awkward subject.

Speaker 5 The gap between the old story of the Thanksgiving holiday, the story we like to tell and grew up on, and what actually might have happened.

Speaker 5 If you think you might enjoy seeing well-meaning liberals running afoul of their own good intentions, this is the play for you.

Speaker 5 When the Thanksgiving play premiered on Broadway last year, our critic Vincent Cunningham spoke with the playwright Larissa Fasthorse.

Speaker 5 She's the only Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.

Speaker 6 I grew up in South Dakota, where my Lakota people are from.

Speaker 6 But I was adopted at a young age and open adoption to a white family who had worked on the reservation for a long time, the reservation that I'm from.

Speaker 6 I was always raised very aware of my Lakota identity and my Lakota culture. And they brought a lot of mentors into my life and elders to help me stay connected in that way.

Speaker 6 But at the same time, I was growing up in a very white culture. And my first career was in classical ballet.
So it doesn't really get much wider than that. I don't know, maybe opera, I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 There's a list, but ballet is on the top. They're way up there.
Yeah, they're always in the like top five.

Speaker 7 So,

Speaker 6 you know, at the time,

Speaker 6 when I was younger, it was very painful

Speaker 6 to be separated from a lot of things I felt like I couldn't partake in because I wasn't raised on the reservation or I'd been away from my Lakota family so long. And that was very hard.

Speaker 6 But now, you know, I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture and experiences and contemporary Indigenous experiences and translate them into white for white audiences, which unfortunately are the majority of audiences still in American theater.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I do want to go back to this thing about ballet because it does seem like this really important part of your life that

Speaker 3 you were a professional ballet dancer. And

Speaker 3 how much did your training as a dancer, how much does that sort of stay with you? Is that a part of your approach as a writer?

Speaker 3 Do you think about that often when you're working?

Speaker 6 Oh, yes. My ballet background is hugely influential in my work as a playwright.

Speaker 6 First off, just in the work ethic.

Speaker 6 Ballet dancers are expected to be shown something once and then you work on it on your own and you come back and you've got it down.

Speaker 6 Like people aren't going to sit there and spend a lot of time spoon feeding things or teaching you one thing at a time. You're expected to learn it.

Speaker 6 You're expected to do your own training at night after six hours of classes and rehearsal.

Speaker 6 You're expected to do a lot on your own. And that kind of work ethic certainly has helped me as a playwright where you spend

Speaker 6 months sometimes alone in your home writing and you could miss that deadline. No one's going to yell at you.

Speaker 6 But also you can really see it in my writing.

Speaker 6 There's a lot of movement-based

Speaker 6 acting, I guess, you know, text-free scenes in my work. The Thanksgiving play is a perfect example.
There's several scenes that have little to no text that are movement-based and

Speaker 6 they are moving the story forward and they're essential to the story, but without using text or very little text and a lot of movement and gesture.

Speaker 3 So the Thanksgiving play.

Speaker 3 It's about four people who, let's say, present as white, trying to put on a play about the first Thanksgiving and sort of trying and I think often failing to acknowledge this native presence that they are somehow trying to highlight.

Speaker 3 And I was thinking a lot about, let's say, what's happening in Florida, about like how we educate our children about topics that might make them feel whatever, guilty or upset.

Speaker 3 How much of today's dramas over education and race and history were you thinking about with this new production?

Speaker 6 Oh, a lot.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I definitely have updated a lot for the times.

Speaker 6 It's interesting you mentioned Florida. The laws state if something causes, I think it's guilt, discomfort, or anguish based on your race, it can't be taught in a school.
And

Speaker 6 you will hear, well, you'll see those words in the play if you come to it.

Speaker 6 I wanted to make sure that these people, because they are what I call performative wokeness. You know, these are white folks, liberal folks, trying really hard to do everything right.

Speaker 6 And as you said, getting everything wrong.

Speaker 6 And I wanted to make sure that they're people of today and not someone who can look at, you know, I don't want people to be able to say, oh, well, since 2020, we've changed. So this isn't me.

Speaker 6 Because it definitely still is.

Speaker 3 But interestingly,

Speaker 6 one of my first writing mentors was the great Maritamita, who is a Maori writer and filmmaker from New Zealand, E Tei Roa.

Speaker 6 And she said to me on my very first screenplay that I wrote before I was writing plays, she said, Larissa, you can be an artist or you can be an educator.

Speaker 6 If you try to be both, you'll do one of them badly. So you have to pick one.
And I chose artist.

Speaker 6 And she said, there's certainly art that educates and there's education that's artistic, but you have to choose which one you are and stay true to that.

Speaker 3 I mean, I imagine that that tension is exacerbated by the expectations of the audience, right? I mean, just the way the arts happen in America, usually the audiences are white. Right.
And they often,

Speaker 3 I think it's fair to say some people, people come to the theater

Speaker 3 on some level, hoping to have some sort of educational experience as opposed to art.

Speaker 3 So it's like, what I love about your play is that it's like, no, you're just going to laugh and it's going to feel weird. And

Speaker 3 is that something that you like to play with or is it something that feels like a hurdle?

Speaker 6 No, absolutely.

Speaker 3 No, I love that.

Speaker 3 One thing I love about this play, there's a character named Alicia, and she's played by Darcy Carton,

Speaker 3 a very funny, wonderful performer. And she's hired on the assumption that she is a Native person.
Right.

Speaker 3 And I thought about this because a lot of the literature that I was raised on, like black literature,

Speaker 3 passing is a big theme.

Speaker 3 What does passing mean to you on stage and off?

Speaker 6 You know, I'm a white passing in many ways. And yet at the same time, before I was writing when I was acting for a while, and the casting director said to me,

Speaker 6 We can tell you're not completely white and that's a problem.

Speaker 3 And I was like, wow.

Speaker 6 And I was like, okay, I'm done.

Speaker 3 There's nothing I can do about that. Is that America's subtitle? Is that perhaps the whole thing?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 6 That should be a little subtitle underneath.

Speaker 3 United States of America. We can tell you're not white.
That's the problem.

Speaker 6 Yeah. So it was,

Speaker 6 you know, so I'm, but I am very light-skinned. And

Speaker 6 again, it was something that was sometimes painful because colorism, you know, is a thing in our communities.

Speaker 6 And it was sometimes painful that I was so light and white passing growing up with a lot of, you know, full-blood. I mean, my father is full-blood and they're much darker, my biological father.

Speaker 6 And so I had some pain over that growing up, and especially because then I was raised away from it. It's like, who are you, you know, showing up again.

Speaker 6 However, then on the other side,

Speaker 6 on the white side, which is like American theater,

Speaker 6 I am

Speaker 3 quite sure

Speaker 6 that I get into rooms that

Speaker 6 not white passing Native people would not get into.

Speaker 3 Yeah. It's funny.
The other thing about Alicia is that she's brought in, you know, specifically and like not just to be an actorly presence, but it's like, we're going to use her expertise.

Speaker 3 And we're going to be like, what do you have to say? Please tell us, you know.

Speaker 3 Wisdom.

Speaker 3 I would imagine that that has some corollary to your experience.

Speaker 6 Oh, it's exhausting.

Speaker 6 I always say, I just can't imagine what it would be like to just like for a white male playwright. Like they just walk into a theater and they just to playwright and they don't do anything else.

Speaker 6 Like, I can't imagine what that's like. I've never done it.

Speaker 6 Because, you know, I mean, I'm so fortunate with the career I've had, but I'm also the first one in 90% of the places I've worked, like the first one in this theater, first one in,

Speaker 6 you know, it's just because I'm on every

Speaker 3 six shows this year, and it's like most of them I'm the first Native American, right?

Speaker 6 I guess this is, you know, the privilege of being the first means that I also have responsibility.

Speaker 6 I do what I call Indian 101 that all of the staff has to come to, including front of house, box office, production, everybody,

Speaker 6 to help them understand Indigenous culture, the space they're standing in, and most importantly, our audiences that we're hoping to welcome into the theater.

Speaker 6 And how do we welcome them and understanding that theater is a white culture? Western American theater is a white culture.

Speaker 6 You know, the assumptions you're making of what's acceptable behavior in theater is completely different than what is normal behavior in so many cultures in this continent.

Speaker 3 One of the great things about the Thanksgiving play is that it spotlights so many things about theater that present to us as issues and actually say, well, do we really mean that? And

Speaker 3 I think we've all settled into an orthodoxy, let's say, of like, you can't play outside of your race and ethnicity, whatever, your look.

Speaker 3 But of course, what that means is

Speaker 3 if there aren't Indigenous roles to play,

Speaker 3 Indigenous actors are never able to do that act of representation. In your experience, just working with actors and stuff,

Speaker 3 how have people started to think about that?

Speaker 6 So that's interesting because actually casting is still very complicated.

Speaker 6 Red face is being done regularly all over our country on film and TV, on stages. There's so many non-Indigenous actors still playing Indigenous roles.

Speaker 6 And there's so many people calling themselves Indigenous that cannot in any way prove they're Indigenous and have no actual connection to any Indigenous community playing Indigenous roles.

Speaker 6 People say

Speaker 6 they understand more and they're doing better and yet there they are.

Speaker 6 Red face is being done constantly. Conversely, fascinatingly,

Speaker 6 when I, if you read the script of the Thanksgiving play, I put in the character description that people of color who can pass for white should be considered for roles. Right.

Speaker 6 And I was really proud of that. But when I get to New York,

Speaker 6 we were told we can't put that in the casting breakdown. Well, you can't ask people to play someone else.

Speaker 6 I was like, wait, there are still white people on these stages in New York City right now playing native, this was a few years ago, playing native, but you're saying I can't openly have non

Speaker 6 white people play white people if they look white to you?

Speaker 6 And he's like, No, you absolutely can't. I'm not allowed to ask people if they're Native American when they're being cast.

Speaker 6 And so

Speaker 6 we have to do this whole kind of song and dance of I kind of try to

Speaker 6 figure it out by chit chat and seeing like, and then people get all mad because we cast a knot at someone that turns out they weren't Native or they didn't have a connection in the community.

Speaker 6 And it's just, it's this constant like thing, which is all part of, you know, what we're dealing with in Thanksgiving play.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, I mean, one way of interpreting the show is that it's about the sort of the most far-reaching implications of meaning well.

Speaker 3 It seems to me that the people that are gonna that come to Broadway shows are like

Speaker 3 these same well-meaning people.

Speaker 3 I don't know what has been the response to

Speaker 3 that.

Speaker 3 This is kind of you. What, you know, how do you feel?

Speaker 6 Oh, it's absolutely you.

Speaker 6 I mean, no, like, I do not hide that. Um, you know, uh,

Speaker 6 yeah, I don't hide the fact that this is about, you know, white liberal folks, which tend to be theater goers, not all.

Speaker 6 I mean, I think the thing that I keep saying, but it's been very important to me in this play was

Speaker 6 that first it's fun

Speaker 6 and that you get to have a good time in the theater. And second, it's, I always say that's the sugar and then there's the medicine.
And so it's satire. It's a comedy within a satire.

Speaker 6 So the satire is the medicine and you have to keep taking it through it. And yeah, honestly, some people opt out.

Speaker 3 We've had a couple, you know, a couple people walk out. And really.

Speaker 6 And like once it got too far in,

Speaker 6 they were just like, no, this is, this is too much.

Speaker 3 And I can imagine at least one scene where that might happen.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 But, you know, the vast majority of audiences are really.

Speaker 6 raucously responsive and really having a fun time. Last week, we had audience members talking to the stage, like talking back.
And I mean, it just got wild.

Speaker 6 They added like six, seven, eight minutes to the show.

Speaker 3 Whoa. Yeah, it was crazy.
That's a lot of talking.

Speaker 6 It was a lot of talking and chatting and clapping and, you know, responding.

Speaker 8 And like, we love that.

Speaker 3 Something that I've wondered,

Speaker 3 because I think most people who live on Manhattan

Speaker 3 think about the Lenape only, usually before a show or something. And then someone comes out and does a land acknowledgement and says, this is the land of the Lenape people.

Speaker 3 How do you feel about that practice?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, land acknowledgement, honestly, I know in some

Speaker 6 places we're getting a little tired of it, but I will say

Speaker 6 it's not everywhere. You know, for me, until everybody in the United States of America can name the Indigenous land they're standing on, we need to keep doing it.

Speaker 6 But, you know, I always say too, though, land acknowledgement is a step. So it's the first step of many steps toward reparation, right?

Speaker 6 So you have to at least know who reparations are owed to for the land that you're on, who are you paying rent to. And And then you need to start paying the rent.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much for doing this. Of course,

Speaker 6 thanks for having me. It's so much fun.

Speaker 5 That's Larissa Fast Horse speaking with staff writer Vincent Cunningham last year when the Thanksgiving play premiered on Broadway. It's been produced all over the country.

Speaker 5 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come.

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Speaker 5 This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Speaker 5 If you're feeling a little stressed out lately, not that I'm implying anything stressful is going on, you might do what a Yellowt Waldman did and take up a hobby.

Speaker 7 It begins with a pattern, or in the case of what's known as improv quilting, an idea, an emotion, or even just a whim. Today I'm in the mood to make circles.
Then there's the fabric.

Speaker 7 You choose it not only by color, but also how it feels in your hand. Should the fabric be slick or should it be nubbly?

Speaker 5 Waldman is a novelist and essayist and earlier this year she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about quilting.

Speaker 5 Waldman discovered that quilting was not just pleasant or useful but a way not to go out of your mind.

Speaker 7 You sew two pieces together in a small block and then small blocks together in larger blocks, each time returning to the iron to smooth the block and to the cutting table to talk with producer Jeffrey Masters and he's also a recent convert.

Speaker 8 Now going back to last year, can you explain what was going on when you began quilting and how that launched you into this?

Speaker 7 It's such a strange, I don't even really understand it myself entirely, although I worked hard to figure it out in the essay that I wrote for you guys. So October 7th, I was born in Israel.

Speaker 7 I have family there, but I've been a Palestinian peace activist for a really long time.

Speaker 7 On October 7th, I kind of lost my mind.

Speaker 7 As the news was coming in, I was getting more and more distraught, obviously. And I couldn't sleep.
And I was seeing the attack in my head. And I was getting up.

Speaker 7 I was sleeping just a couple of hours a night. And

Speaker 7 at some point,

Speaker 7 my older daughter and I, my daughter's very crafty. So I had bought her some fabric and a little sewing machine.
And I was looking at the sewing machine that I had bought. And I took my laptop over.

Speaker 7 And I switched over to this video. I just Googled how to make a quilt.

Speaker 7 And I found this video of this middle-aged lady hi everybody it's Jenny from the Missouri Star Quilt Company and I've got a really fun project for you today take a look at this quilt behind me gosh doesn't this look like you worked hard from that moment from literally that moment every waking hour for months I was quilting

Speaker 7 I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine, I would quilt all day, and then I'd go to sleep. It wasn't like I was checking out.
It was not that.

Speaker 7 So I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on. But somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands.
And

Speaker 7 I decided I want to know how and why.

Speaker 8 And so you went to YouTube to like learn how to do this. That's where I started too, when I came over a squilt.

Speaker 7 Well, what had made you do it?

Speaker 3 Oh, I don't know.

Speaker 8 I don't have a good answer for you.

Speaker 8 I just felt this call, but I did relate to this concept you wrote about, which was I'd never heard of called piecing for cover, which I guess it just means you're making something for warmth to be used, not for display.

Speaker 8 And that I really relate it to because

Speaker 8 I wanted to make something useful.

Speaker 8 I'm like kind of obsessed with this idea of like the apocalypse and like what will happen if we like lose technology. And I was like, I make radio.
Like I can't trade a podcast episode for food.

Speaker 8 But and I mean this like genuinely, if something felt like safe and like familiar that I now have this like skill I can like use if it all goes to hell.

Speaker 7 I haven't thought of it that way, but I think it's so that it is really part of it in this way. I mean, what I want to make is I want to make something that I can find comfort in.

Speaker 7 I don't make small quilts ever. I make quilts that I like, I'll make a quilt you can cuddle up under on the couch, but mostly I make quilts.
My first quilt was for a twin-size bed, which is crazy.

Speaker 7 They're like, oh, do one that's like, you know, one panel. What about you? What was your first quilt?

Speaker 8 Oh, it was way too big for our first quilt. It's five feet by seven feet.

Speaker 3 Right. Exactly.

Speaker 7 You did the same thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And it just all goes back to wanting to like make something useful.

Speaker 3 But, but, but tell me this.

Speaker 8 You said that when you first started quilting, you were doing it all day.

Speaker 3 Now, how many hours do you spend a day quilting?

Speaker 3 Six.

Speaker 3 Okay, so you're like, you, like, what do you, what do you used to do with your days? But, like, on a weekend. Well, that's what I asked my husband.

Speaker 7 Oh my God, you, this is the exact question. I said to Michael, um, dude, what did I do with my days before?

Speaker 7 But I think, I swear to God, Jeffrey, I think I was just online. I think a lot of this time is time I didn't even realize I was spending on the internet.

Speaker 7 And the reason I think I didn't even realize was because the physical act of wasting time for me is identical to the physical act of working.

Speaker 7 So if I get up from my laptop after spending the entire day on my laptop, I'm like, okay, well,

Speaker 7 that was working. And then if I really parse it out, how much of that time was actually working? Four hours, five hours, max, or nothing, depending on, you know, my state of procrastination.

Speaker 7 So honestly, I feel like I was literally spending that time on the internet.

Speaker 8 I think one of the things I like so much about your piece, New Yorker, too, is that this is not just like one person's like personal story about like what they do to de-stress and get less anxious.

Speaker 8 You actually interviewed brain surgeons and neuroscientists that confirmed that this is like what like the vast majority of people also can experience because of our like brain makeup and chemistry.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I mean, it's remarkable. I knew something had to be going on with my brain because I was feeling so different i was managing stress and i think it was the first time that um

Speaker 7 i was stressing out about something and my husband said to me why don't you go quilt and i thought huh

Speaker 7 yes and also what the heck is going on so was that the immediate feeling in your brain in your body totally i smell the fabric i hear the machine and I start touching the fabric and I am like everything

Speaker 7 that's going on in, you know, that agitation you feel when you're stressed, that kind of feeling in your throat, in your stomach, in the back, it just vanishes. It's so curious.

Speaker 7 Let me tell you a little bit about what I think is going on in your brain and what all of these various neurosurgeons have told me. Okay, so.

Speaker 7 Some of it has to do with this idea of bilateral brain activity. So, you know, we have our right brain and our left brain.

Speaker 7 And when we are engaged in bilateral stimulation, that actually makes us relaxed. It induces a kind of comfortable feeling.

Speaker 7 And quilting and some other handwork is a very bilateral activity because you're using both your hands.

Speaker 7 You're going about between things that are very technical and mathy and a kind of creative thing. And you're doing that sort of alternating back and forth.

Speaker 7 And then there's this amazing thing called your default mode network. So the default mode network is this brain system that is active when you're in the state of think about wakeful rest, right?

Speaker 7 You're letting your mind wander. It might be when you're on a walk, when you're not controlling what you're thinking about, right?

Speaker 7 And that kind of wakeful rest, when your default mode network kind of switches on and takes over is very, very restful.

Speaker 7 And when you go back to paying attention, you find yourself kind of rested and invigorated.

Speaker 8 You know, that reminds me that like in 2017, you wrote the book, A Really Good Day, about micro-dosing LSD. It's a way to help like mood and anxiety disorders.

Speaker 3 Right. Like, does quilting have the same effect for you?

Speaker 3 Totally. I mean, that's what's interesting.

Speaker 7 Like the book that I wrote, like the big discovery I made. So A Really Good Day is about an experiment micro-dosing with LSD.

Speaker 7 And the big discovery I made doing all this research about psychedelics and the brain is that what psychedelics do is push your default network. I mean, this is obviously very simplified.

Speaker 3 They push your default mode network off the track.

Speaker 7 And having your default mode network veer off into a new and different direction can be really productive. So to find out that this other thing that I'm doing is also

Speaker 7 inextricably linked to the default mode network is really fascinating.

Speaker 3 That's also not illegal.

Speaker 7 There's no crime involved in quilting.

Speaker 5 You can read Ayela Waldman's essay, Peacing for Cover, at NewYorker.com.

Speaker 5 She spoke with Jeffrey Masters, the senior producer on our show.

Speaker 7 You and I, we're taking this show on the road.

Speaker 3 We're going to go to Quilt Con.

Speaker 7 We're going to go to Missouri Star. You're going to turn the New Yorker radio hour into all quilting.
The whole country's going to lose its mind.

Speaker 3 David, step aside.

Speaker 5 I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today.
If you're traveling this week, be safe. Good luck, and have a wonderful holiday.

Speaker 4 The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 4 Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbis of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul.

Speaker 4 This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Prasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer.

Speaker 4 With guidance from Emily Botine and assistance assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barrch, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett.

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