Time hasn’t been kind to Larissa FastHorse’s new play Fake It Till You Make It. That may be an odd thing to say about a world premiere that just opened last night but if you stick with me, you’ll see what I mean.
Fake It Till You Make It is a broad farce that takes place in the shared office space of three indigenous non-profits. There’s N.O.B.U.S.H, run by Wynona who is fiercely dedicated to ensuring no butterfly bushes invade native plant species; Krys runs a non-profit for folks who identify as two-spirit; there’s the mysterious new non-profit that Grace runs that seems a little shifty; finally, there’s the white girl, River, who runs Indigenous People Rising. You can likely see where this is going.
Ms. FastHorse’s Broadway play, The Thanksgiving Play (that if you were lucky you saw at the Geffen Playhouse) has the same comedic target as her new play: cultural appropriation, more specifically indigenous cultural appropriation. Here the drama circles around the implicit question: is it okay for a white woman to get grant money and attention supporting another race? And worse, what if she’s more successful at it?
Stylistically the play is going for Feydeau farce energy with slamming doors, missed entrances, and a fair bit of bawdy, sexual humor and innuendo. Where The Thanksgiving Play had a sharp target, overly earnest white liberals who were going to do a culturally sensitive play that finally honored the voice of Native Americans, Fake It Till You Make It takes aim at all of its characters. Which is part of the problem.
Farce is tricky. Counterintuitively for a form that can be so broad and chaotic, it actually requires that the small “p” politics of the play are actually quite sharp. Who wins and who loses or who the play rewards has to be clear. We need to have a sense of who we’re rooting for or who we condemn. It’s not that there aren’t reversals, in fact, those are often the most delicious moments in farce, but we need to have a sense of what — beyond all the pratfalls and slammed doors — the play cherishes. Is it the young lovers? Or revealing how the stodgy old man is a fool? Or society as a whole? Regardless, farce is there to remind us of our folly, our hypocrisy, and the absurdity of our societal codes and rituals. But to do that, we have to have someone or something to hold on to so that we can see the difference.
Without giving away the whole plot or the ending, the challenge with Ms. FastHorse’s play is that she is so busy pointing out everyone’s foibles and lies, that we don’t actually get an anchor. It’s a bit nihilistic in the same way as the ending of The Thanksgiving Play suggested the only answer was silence. It’s not the small “p” politics that have moved beyond the play, it’s really national politics. The play’s central gripe is how a white woman gets DEI grants that should really go to a person of color. Juxtapose that with the headline I read on my way to the theater, Pam Bondi Instructs Trump DOJ to Criminally Investigate Companies That Do DEI. While the backlash to anything DEI-related has been in the air since campaign season, the atmospheric shift of the past two weeks couldn’t be more stark.
Fake It Till You Make It is a play written from another time. Sadly, the very notion that there would be a DEI grant is now almost farcical.
In fairness, this isn’t Ms. FastHorse’s fault. It’s rumored that this play was originally going to be part of the Taper season that Center Theatre Group canceled when it needed to take a financial hiatus. Perhaps this play would have played differently in the “before.”
This highlights, as I wrote about several weeks ago , how tricky artistic programming is in this moment. The best companies, the best artists, know what we’re going to feel, or more importantly what we’re going to need — before we need it. And the best art, magically, finds resonances in the present even when it speaks from the past.
It’s wonderful to see Native American actors bring a work of one of their own to life on the Taper stage. There’s a ton of energy and it might be a relief to step into the theater and forget for 90 minutes... but the return to our present moment is jarring.
Fake It Till You Make It plays at the Mark Taper Forum downtown through March 9th.
This is Anthony Byrnes opening the curtain of LA Theater for KCRW.