Three years later, FastHorse took “The Thanksgiving Play” to Broadway, where it opened to rave reviews. Jesse Green, chief theater critic of The New York Times, praised it as a “brutal satire about mythmaking” and “cheerfully cutthroat.”
“When Larissa asked me to join her as a director, I was very honored, honestly, but I did ask her if she maybe wanted a collaborator of color, and a Native director specifically,” said the director Rachel Chavkin, a Tony winner for “Hadestown.” “But she was very clear that she needed someone with extreme expertise in whiteness, which I have in spades.”
TRUE TO ITS NAME, “Fake It” began life with its own bit of fakery. In 2020, FastHorse had been commissioned to write a play for the Taper, which the theater would soon announce. But FastHorse didn’t have an idea for the play, or a title. She told Luis Alfaro, one of the Taper’s artistic directors at the time, some of the things she had been thinking about — race shifters, pretendians — and he suggested the title “Fake It Until You Make It.” She could always change the name, he told her.
“A month later, there were these huge banners with ‘Fake It Until You Make It’ on them,” she said. “I told Luis, ‘I can’t change the name now, can I?’ And he was like, ‘No, you cannot.’”
The play was scheduled to open in 2023. In June of that year, however, just two weeks before rehearsals were to begin, however, the Taper suspended the remainder of its season, citing a financial crisis exacerbated by the pandemic.
