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

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

The Thanksgiving play is a play about the making of a play. It's also a very timely comedy

about an awkward subject. The gap between the old story of the Thanksgiving holiday,

the story we'd like to tell and grew up on,

and what actually might have happened. If you think you might enjoy seeing well-meaning liberals running a foul of their own good intentions, this is the play for you. When the Thanksgiving

play premiered on Broadway last year, our critic, Vincent Cunningham, spoke with the playwright Larissa Fast Horse.

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

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

But I was adopted at a young age, an open adoption to a white family who had worked on the reservation for a long time, the reservation I'm from. I was always raised very aware of my Lakota identity and my Lakota culture. And they brought a lot of mentors into my life and elders to help me stay connected in that way. But at the same time, I was growing up in a very white culture.

And my first career was in classical ballet,

so it doesn't really get much whiter than that.

I don't know, maybe opera, I'm not sure.

There's a list, but ballet is on the top of the top of it.

They're way up there, yeah, they're There was in the, like, top five. So, you know, at the time when I was younger, it was very painful, right?

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

Yeah. I do want to go back to this thing about ballet because it does seem like this really

important part of your life that you're a professional ballet dancer. And 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? Does it? Do you think about that often

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