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

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

2024/11/29
logo of podcast The New Yorker Radio Hour

The New Yorker Radio Hour
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Ayelet Waldman
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Larissa FastHorse
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Larissa FastHorse探讨了创作一部关于感恩节的戏剧的挑战，以及如何在尊重土著文化的同时，创作出既能娱乐又能引发思考的戏剧。她分享了自己作为拉科塔人的身份认同，以及如何在白人主导的戏剧环境中，将拉科塔文化和当代土著经验翻译给白人观众。她还谈到了在演员选角过程中遇到的问题，以及如何平衡艺术创作和教育责任。她认为她的戏剧《感恩节戏剧》既是娱乐，也是对社会问题的批判，观众需要不断思考作品背后的深刻含义。她还谈到了土地致谢的重要性，以及这仅仅是走向赔偿的众多步骤中的第一步。 Ayelet Waldman讲述了她通过学习缝纫和制作被子来应对压力和焦虑的经历。她解释了这种活动如何帮助她应对中东冲突带来的负面情绪，并保持一种可承受的焦虑水平。她还采访了神经科学家，了解了这种手工活动如何通过双侧脑活动和默认模式网络的激活来缓解压力和焦虑。她将制作被子的效果与之前进行的微剂量服用LSD实验进行了比较，两者都与大脑的默认模式网络有关。

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Chapters
The Thanksgiving Play, a Broadway production by Larissa FastHorse, tackles the challenges of creating a respectful and inclusive Thanksgiving performance. The play uses humor to address the gap between the traditional narrative and the historical reality of Thanksgiving, prompting reflection on education and race in America.
  • The play satirizes well-meaning liberals grappling with their own good intentions.
  • It highlights the ongoing tension between artistic expression and educational expectations.
  • The playwright discusses the challenges of representation and casting in theatre, particularly concerning Indigenous roles.

Shownotes Transcript

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that’s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. “First it’s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that’s the sugar, and then there’s the medicine,” the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it.” FastHorse was born into the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and was adopted as a child into a white family. She is the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. “When I was younger, it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things that I felt like I couldn’t partake in because I wasn’t raised on the reservation or had been away from my Lakota family so long,” she says. “But now I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture . . . and contemporary Indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are still the majority of audiences in American theatre.”*This segment originally aired on April 14, 2023. *

Plus, earlier this year, the author and essayist Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay for The New Yorker about taking up a new hobby. Trying to cope with intensely stressful news, Waldman dove head first into teaching herself how to quilt. “I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine. I would quilt all day and then I’d go to sleep. It wasn’t like I was checking out; I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on,” she told the producer Jeffrey Masters. “But somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands, and I decided I want to know how and why.” Waldman talked with neuroscientists about the reason that certain brain activities seem to relax us. And to her surprise, it wasn’t hard to find hours each day, in the life of a busy writer, to pursue a new vocation. “Honestly,” she admits, “I was literally spending that time on the Internet.”