Two local writers get ‘ genius’ prize
A playwright and a USC historian will receive grants from MacArthur group.
Santa Monica playwright Larissa FastHorse ignored several calls from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the organization that doles out $ 625,000 “genius” grants to creatives. She thought the calls were spam.
When the foundation sent a text asking to talk, FastHorse then assumed someone wanted to hire her consulting f irm, Indigenous Direction, which helps companies and artists create accurate work about Native communities.
“Right now, a lot of funders are looking to — fortunately — start Indigenous funding programs,” FastHorse said.
FastHorse was still in denial after learning she was named a 2020 MacArthur fellow for “creating space for Indigenous artists, stories and experiences in mainstream theater and countering misrepresentation of Native American perspectives in broader society.”
The playwright is one of 21 fellows this year across arts, education, science, media, law and environmental studies, a class that includes USC historian Natalia Molina, singer and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant, filmmaker Nanfu Wang
and writers N. K. Jemisin, Fred Moten and Cristina Rivera Garza. Each receives a $ 625,000 no- strings- attached award to be dispersed over five years.
“My husband and I are both full- time artists and as recently as a couple years ago, we were still below the poverty level here in Los Angeles,” said FastHorse, 49.
Based in Santa Monica, FastHorse has written plays that center the contemporary Indigenous experience in the U. S. for close to 15 years. A dual citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and the U. S., she began her career as a ballet dancer, and after retiring at 30, she started working in f ilm and television. She turned to theater looking to write more accurate portrayals of Indigenous life.
“I got into playwriting not just to write plays but to change the f ield,” she told The Times last year. “My gift is as a translator. What I can do well is take Indigenous contemporary experiences and translate them for white
audiences because that’s what we have.”
Her f irst play, “Average Family,” about an urban Native family and a rural white family on a reality TV show set in the 1840s, premiered in 2007. She has written and choreographed other plays including the 2008 piece “Teaching Disco Square Dancing to Our Elders: A Class Presentation,” produced by the Autry Museum of the American West’s thea
ter company, Native Voices, and the 2017 work “What Would Crazy Horse Do?,” staged at Kansas City Repertory Theatre.
Her satirical “The Thanksgiving Play” skewering the mythology of Pilgrims and Indians f inding peace through breaking bread, premiered in 2018 at New York’s Playwrights Horizons. The work, staged at the Geffen Playhouse in L. A. last year, landed among
American Theatre magazine’s annual ranking of the 10 most produced plays.
FastHorse said she’s still wrapping her mind around the enormity of the award — “what that means to be able to let go of that constant fear of [ not] being able to pay the rent.”
The MacArthur Foundation honored USC historian Molina for “revealing how narratives of racial difference that were constructed and applied to immigrant groups a century ago continue to shape national policy today.”
Molina thought she was joining a phone call with MacArthur staffers to discuss other nominees when she learned of her award last month.
“I had my yellow legal pad out, my pen was poised,” she said. “Then they said: ‘ We’d like to talk about the nominee, and that nominee is you!’ I was shocked. It was such a brain jam. But then it was just gratitude. This will be good for talking about race, social justice, issues of equality. It was just: Thank you for caring about these issues.”
When Molina was growing up in Echo Park in the 1970s, she’d spend evenings at the Mexican restaurant her mother owned, Nayarit, a neighborhood staple her grandmother founded in 1951 that was frequented by a cross section of the city: immigrants, Dodgers players after games, celebrities such as Marlon Brando and Rita Moreno. The nights were late, and after hours of people- watching and escorting customers to their tables, a young Natalia would crawl into a red vinyl booth and fall asleep.
Molina would go on to spend nearly two decades exploring how long- held stereotypes and narratives of immigrant communities have shaped public policy. She is working on the book “Place- makers: The Story of an Ethnic Mexican Community in Twentieth- Century Los Angeles,” which explores the restaurant’s history as an urban anchor for immigrants.
“There is this moment — we’re seeing how people’s civil rights and human rights are being disregarded,” she said. “One moment it’s the story of George Floyd, the next an Asian American who’s had acid thrown on them, and the next, a child being separated from their parents — and that can be in one day. We need to see how these racial moments are connected so that we can make systemic change.”