Julie Bowen and Noah Bean (Photo by Makela Yepez)

Trying to Meet the Moment (When the Moment Shifts Under Your Feet)

Larissa FastHorse’s Fake It Until You Make it

All in the Timing

Here’s wishing that, without reservation, I could rise up and cheer the satirical farce, Fake It Until You Make It, written by the first Native American author (Larissa FastHorse) to be produced on the Mark Taper Forum’s mainstage. But as I straighten my legs and raise my hands in a gesture of adulation, my back cramps and my knees start to buckle. This is the psychosomatic response to wanting to show an enthusiasm that I don’t entirely feel.

For those who have lived long enough, this production might seem like yet another manifestation of the conviction of the Taper’s Founding Artistic Director, the late Gordon Davidson: the importance of opening the doors of the Taper to voices hitherto marginalized and silenced by some combination of apathy and disregard. After all, this was the theater that galvanized the city in 1978 with a production of Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez’s musical docudrama about L.A.’s  Zoot Suit riots, penned by what was then the first Chicano author to be presented on the Taper mainstage. This production moved from workshop to mainstage within a year.

Davidson was also the leader who commissioned Black writer-performer Anna Deavere Smith’s brilliant solo performance, Twilight, Los Angeles: 1992. This play and performer embodied multiple voices speaking from the rubble of the violent uprising across L.A. that was triggered by the acquittal of five LAPD police officers after they’d tasered and billy clubbed an unarmed Black driver named Rodney King. This was among the first such police abuses captured on a bystander’s (George Holliday) cellphone and broadcast across the world, after King was stopped for speeding. Keep in mind, the violence, in which block after block of largely mom-and-pop Korean businesses were torched, occurred in April, 1992. Smith’s play was on the Taper mainstage by April, 1993.

Both of these productions were shots heard around the country, if not the world. Both were examples of our flagship theater rising to meet the cultural moment. The Taper moved like lightning in those years.

It’s all in the timing.

It took years for the Taper to get around to producing FastHorse’s comedy. It was supposed to have been presented in 2023 as part of a series of plays by women and non-binary playwrights. But then, mid-season, the theater ran out of money and closed its doors for a year. This was in the wake of Covid: Audiences had abandoned the increasingly doctrinaire downtown theater, while Board members fled the Center Theatre Group, the Taper’s parent organization. FastHorse penned a somewhat empathetic (to then incoming artistic director Snehal Desai) editorial in the L.A. Times that was also somewhat aggrieved, equating the Taper’s shutdown to censorship, and complaining about her lost income, since she could have premiered the play on Broadway for “more money.”

“This cancellation is part of a legacy that constantly reasserts that we have no power here,” FastHorse wrote.

Part of her frustration when she wrote this op-ed was that, at the time of the programming pause, there were no longer plans to present her play there. Shortly thereafter, they committed to doing the play once they were back in action: One would surmise that ultimately her income, like her play, was not cancelled but deferred. Others in that season were not so lucky, though she was also writing on their behalf.

“We are never safe,” FastHorse’s op ed continued. “Once again, our stories are disposable or just not relevant.”

It’s 2025 now. And who in the theater feels safe? Who in our country feels safe? In an era of gross misinformation, disinformation, unfettered bigotry, gleeful sadism, persecution, and tribalism, whose story is safe? Online, or in the theater?

In some ways, FastHorse’s indignation in 2023 is justified. Her play, a fitfully clever farce stemming from the premise that nobody, but nobody, is who they seem, speaks to the cultural moment of 2023, but not so much 2025, despite the fraud and duplicity that’s unfolding at present. Without a revision, its sell-by date was November 6, 2024, when we learned the results of our election. This is not because FastHorse is a Native American author. It’s because Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his man-child incel goons have knocked the stuffing out of her play’s immediacy.

Trump just took over the Kennedy Center, and has ordered that all federal National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants for 2026 be awarded to artists promoting “American patriotism,” whatever that means. No, I think we know exactly what that means. Safe?

The Mark Taper Forum aside, is there a reason why our theaters, even those with 35 seats, program their seasons three years in advance — especially if they’re presenting new plays? The job of playwrights is to capture the cultural moment in which they write. That three-year delay ensures that new plays mounted in theaters, large and small, will be behind the curve. This is an administrative abuse of playwrights, of their intelligence and of their grasp of the world. If a play is three years old by the time it gets onto the stage, we’re all better off streaming Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert, who at least keep pace with current events. Fine, our playwrights can try to update their plays to stay abreast of changing times, but that feels like a gratuitous if not cruel chase. Fine, our theater can traffic in Stephen Sondheim revivals, countless productions of Noises Off, The Play That Went Wrong, and other forms of nostalgia and diversion which audiences desperately need. But these are yet another dent in our theaters’ relevance.

The Taper programmed Green Day’s American Idiot (which opened October 2, 2024) as its Lazarus-like return from the dead. If they’d reserved that slot for Fake It Until You Make It, they would have preserved the play’s relevance to the cultural Zeitgeist of that moment, and Green Day’s American Idiot could be performing right now, with no adverse effect, since it’s a 20th century relic with a Deaf West spin.

How was the Taper supposed to anticipate the rude imposition of white supremacy in our newly elected government, an imposition that has so altered the significance of FastHorse’s play? Perhaps by paying attention to what Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk said they were going to do while on the campaign trail? The regime (because that’s what it is) made it abundantly clear they were holding “woke” responsible for the fall of the American empire (when its excesses were mostly petty annoyances), and Fake It Until You Make It is, among many things, a satirical critique of woke ideology, feeding, unwittingly, right into this bogus argument. It is, in fact, nothing but a ruse to punch down vulnerable people of all ethnicities: stripping them of their healthcare, school lunches for their children, their legal protections, retirement protections, affordable food, safety in the skies, disease prevention and mitigation, road repair, etc.: the services that governments provide.

The punished range from Trump-voting Venezuelan immigrants in Miami, to Native Americans in Riverside County, California, to impoverished Whites in Kentucky — all in the larger push to justify tax cuts for billionaires without raising the federal deficit. Their vision is a gilded age with most of us, of all genders, shapes, sizes and skin colors, reduced to serfdom. They’ve made it clear that they’re going to bully their way to their destination, which they’ve been planning for decades. “Woke” is merely a convenient tool, a useful idiot for their larger scheme of grand theft. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been warning about this for at least a decade.

How ironic, then, that among the butts of FastHorse’s comedy is a character the likes of Elizabeth Warren, a White woman who, for decades, announced herself as Native American for political traction, and whom, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump mocked as “Pocahontas.” She then took a DNA test to support her claim, a test that demonstrated a Cherokee Indian heritage six to ten generations prior, and for which she had to apologize to the Cherokee Nation, since they regard identity less through DNA than through kinship and culture. All of this identity absurdity is in FastHorse’s comedy, including DNA tests that reveal at least the science of who her characters are, often at odds with whom they claim to be. In some instances, they don’t even know who they are. Funny stuff, in 2023.

But given how Warren is currently one of the very few Robin Hoods in our suddenly menacing Sherwood Forest, and that “woke” is currently being marched to the gallows by Republicans and Democrats alike, is it fair to conclude that, through no fault of the playwright, FastHorse’s core joke has worn out its welcome?

Sometimes I feel like shouting to our theaters, like Willy Loman to his ne’er do well sons in Death of a Salesman, “Where are you guys? Where are you? . . . The woods are burning!

 

Fake It Until You Make It

 

 

If you take all this to mean I believe that Fake It Until You Make It is a crappy play, you’d be mistaken. It’s a good play with some piercing insights. The farce gains steam through its 90 minutes, even in the somewhat clumsy production helmed by Michael John Garcés. The setting is the office of an organization called Indigenous Natives Soaring (INS), and the humor stems from various traditions: Roman comedies, Feydeau farces, and satires by Gogol (The Inspector General) and by David Henry Hwang (Yellowface).

 At stake is a grant for the organization, which segues into a satire of what people will do for the money (and to prevent others from getting it). The head of the organization is the comedy’s Elizabeth Warren, a White woman named River (Julie Bowen, an Emmy Award winning TV actress making her stage debut), in the throes of hiring a new Executive Director. Why is a White woman running such an organization? She’s paying off the “karmic debt” of her colonial ancestry, she explains — a dandy rationalization to collect a salary administrating the lives of Native Americans. The grant in question requires that she hire a Native American as ED. She calls in a guy named Theo (Noah Bean), who is going in disguise as “Mark ShortBull” — the name of the actual Native American job applicant who never showed up. I hope it goes without saying that the real Mark ShortBull (Eric Stanton Betts) will appear, in a kind of nod to The Inspector General, contributing to the well-calibrated mayhem stemming from mistaken and fraudulent identities. Meanwhile, Theo is dating what appears to be a Native American woman, Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo), who loves him but refuses to marry him because he’s not of her tribe.

The company attorney, Grace (Dakota Ray Hebert), is of a different Native American tribe, and the two women find themselves at odds. (Hebert is a member of the English River First Nation tribe in Canada). Grace loathes her own family and in each successive scene emerges in the costume of a different ethnicity, from Muslim garb to a Japanese kimono (fantastic costumes by E. B. Brooks), while Wynona is hardcore indigenous.

Part of the production’s awkwardness stems from the farce being played via over-the-top gesticulating, a style cemented in by director Garcés. This is compounded by the play itself, which features a restraining order against staff for messing with River’s pet cat, which she houses in the office, leading to countless pro forma and fairly witless “pussy” jokes. It’s Hebert’s Grace that serves as an anchor, manifest in her dogged determination to avoid the mugging and let the sincerity of Grace’s insanity shine through. And shine it does. By doing so little to punch out the comedy, she gets the lion’s share of laughs.

Finally, there’s Krys (nicely handled by Brandon Delsid) the ostentatious and slightly vulnerable queen-in-residence (speaking of pro forma).

Theo spends his days hacking away English Ivy from the garden — an invasive species that threatens indigenous butterflies. This is kind of his obsession, which is both an allegory and a joke, cast as slightly ridiculous. It’s a satire. What else would one expect? Watching this, all I could think of was the recent L.A. Fires, and Trump’s lie that there was no water in the hydrants because officials were protecting the endangered delta smelt fish. Totally different motive, but it’s the same joke. Given the stakes in 2025, I’m not amused.

But when FastHorse is at her best as a comedy writer, she’s brilliant. In a scene between Theo and Grace, they’re discussing DNA and Grace asks him if he’s ever seen DNA? If not, how does he know it’s real? (It’s the sort of argument that flat-Earth proponents would use: that you can only believe what you can see from wherever you’re situated.) Theo reflects on this for a moment before noting that he’s never seen oxygen either. Well, there you go! Grace replies, as though they’ve stumbled onto an insight when they’ve simply stumbled onto utter nonsense.

The play’s core dichotomy lies between two theories. Grace, the lawyer, is an advocate for “race shifting,” which she employs avidly in her attempts to evade her Native American heritage. It’s the principle that you can identify as whatever race you identify with, because, according to this theory, DNA is nonsense that you can’t even see, compounded by identity confusion that comes with mixed-race heritages. We don’t know who we are because we’re all amalgams, anyway. This would be the perfect antidote to white supremacy and other forms of tribal imperialism, which stem from the alternative theory: that race, like gender, is biologically determined, through DNA and hard wiring. Grace’s case for race shifting is what Rider ultimately employs to hold onto her position: theme and variation on cultural appropriation.  That’s a truly perceptive conundrum.

There’s some brief chatter of feds coming to investigate corruption, which feels chillingly contemporary. Because, in 2025, feds coming to investigate corruption is a ruse for shutting down everything that’s remotely of service. In 2025, the Indigenous Natives Soaring organization wouldn’t survive 10 minutes of such an investigation, because of the very jokes that FastHorse makes at its expense. Were she to indulge in the gratuitous task of chasing updates (because they didn’t, or couldn’t, open her play on time) she would need to grapple with this new, Orwellian reality. Because at present, a play that’s centered on such an organization getting, or not getting, a grant based on its DEI initiatives, feels like a quaint throwback to yesterday. Tomorrow could be a different story entirely. It probably will be.

Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown LA.; Tues.-Sat., 8 pm, Sat., 2:30 pm, Sun., 1:30 pm and 6:30 pm. thru March 9. www.centertheatregroup.org