Timing is all the pieces in comedy, and one wonders how a lot funnier Larissa FastHorse’s “Fake It Until You Make It” may need been had it been produced on the Mark Taper Discussion board in 2023 when it was initially scheduled.
The world has shifted off its axis since that comparatively halcyon time when identification politics, the topic of FastHorse’s farce, may very well be debated, mocked, ranted over and defended with out concern of governmental reprisal. An emboldened Donald Trump has returned to the White Home on a vendetta in opposition to variety, fairness and inclusion initiatives, setting in movement a brand new model of the Purple Scare, besides the goal colour scheme now’s something nonwhite.
As nonprofit companies throughout the land are scrambling to determine how to answer anti-DEI insurance policies and threats from the brand new administration, the delayed premiere of “Fake It Until You Make It” presents a satirical conflict between two rival nonprofit teams engaged on behalf of Native American causes.
Good intentions aren’t any assure of excellent conduct. In “The Thanksgiving Play,” FastHorse skewered with cruel hilarity white woke hypocrisy. Right here, she examines the best way advantage signaling and ethical one-upmanship have warped the nonprofit discipline, turning public service right into a aggressive sport and corrupting even those that have devoted themselves to lifting up their very own communities.
“Fake It Until You Make It” doesn’t anticipate the dire state of affairs unfolding in 2025. Nevertheless it does, helpfully, transfer past the inflexible partisan classes which have clouded our considering and made shared enlightenment appear fully out of attain.
The cleverly constructed play, a co-production with Washington, D.C.’s Enviornment Stage, is freighted with historic significance of its personal. It’s the primary time a Native American playwright has been featured on the Mark Taper Discussion board’s marquee stage — and it virtually didn’t occur. (In a candid interview with Instances reporter Ashley Lee, FastHorse revealed that had Enviornment Stage not stepped in after CTG faltered, there “would have been a lot of hurt and unhealed pain, which would have made this process difficult.”)
When the play begins, River (Julie Bowen of “Modern Family” fame), a white girl who runs Indigenous Nations Hovering, has taken out a restraining order to forestall anybody from messing together with her cat. Wynona (Tonantzin Carmelo), a proudly recognized Native girl who leads N.O.B.U.S.H., a company looking for the removing of invasive vegetation, is the primary goal of River’s ire.
The 2 ladies work in the identical workplace advanced and are bitter enemies. Wynona has designs on River’s cat, and River retains planting a botanical species on office grounds that Wynona is on a fanatical mission to wipe out.
Noah Bean, left, and Julie Bowen in “Fake It Until You Make It” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Makela Yepez)
Battle traces are drawn and instantly transgressed in a play that takes farce out of the bed room and into administrative corridors and cubicles. The doorways that slam, as farcical doorways are constructed to do, open to work areas, the place a great deal of time is spent scheming and counter-scheming.
Mistaken identification is a central conceit of the style, and FastHorse takes this charade to a different mental degree. Whereas reveling within the foolish masquerade, “Fake It Until You Make It” interrogates the that means of racial identification and authenticity, leaving no dogmatic place unscathed by irony.
FastHorse’s nonprofit universe features a vary of characters of assorted ideological commitments and tactical approaches. Theo (Noah Bean), Wynona’s accomplice, is an eco-activist who returns from clearing 1000’s of acres of English ivy from California wilderness to search out himself conscripted into Wynona’s conflict in opposition to River. Theo, who’s white, needs to marry Wynona, however her conscience gained’t let her begin a household with a non-Native.
She dangles, nevertheless, the reward of being his common-law spouse if he pretends to be a Native applicant for a job at River’s group. She needs him to tank an enormous grant software to raised her probabilities of being chosen. Theo has misgivings, however his ardour for Wynona overrides his scruples.
Two different nonprofit leaders have their headquarters on this suite of workplaces. Grace (Dakota Ray Hebert), an advocate for race-shifting, has launched a company to assist folks transition their identities “ethically and safely.” A Native girl wanting to attempt on different selves, she gives costume designer E.B. Brooks the chance to create a pageant of flamboyant worldwide garb, designed to put unmistakable declare to new cultural identities.
Eric Stanton Betts, left, and Brandon Delsid in “Fake It Until You Make It” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Makela Yepez)
Krys (Brandon Delsid), who identifies as gender-fluid, heads a company that advocates for the Two Spirit group. When Mark (Eric Stanton Betts), the native applicant Theo impersonates, exhibits up on the workplace to apologize for lacking the interview with River, Krys runs interference for Wynona. However Mark, a fellow Two Spirit soul with a whole lot of intercourse attraction, erotically complicates Krys’ loyalties.
The farcical math is elegantly labored out by FastHorse, who maps out the following chaos with elan. The manufacturing, directed by Michael John Garcés, shortly reaches cruising pace on a vivid set by Sara Ryung Clement that is stuffed with Native colour and craft.
However a lot as I admired the playwright’s ingenious examination of identification politics by way of the trying glass of farce, I by no means fairly succumbed to the comedy’s demented logic. My resistance wasn’t only a perform of the radically modified political panorama that has made DEI considerations no laughing matter.
There’s a cynicism on the coronary heart of “Fake It Until You Make It” that distances us from the characters. FastHorse, to her credit score, doesn’t write schematic performs. She refuses to deal with her Native protagonist as a hero. However in making Wynona so belligerently flawed and River so narcissistically self-serving, FastHorse diminishes our concern for the end result of their battle. A pox on each their homes, I discovered myself indifferently concluding.
Dakota Ray Hebert, left, and Brandon Delsid in “Fake It Until You Make It” on the Mark Taper Discussion board.
(Makela Yepez)
Grace, who refuses to be confined by demographic class, is in some ways probably the most outrageously polemical of the characters. But she positive factors the higher hand within the debate over identification politics with a perspective that’s as compassionate and cogent as it’s controversial. Sadly, the best way she’s deployed as a sight gag makes it exhausting to take her critically when it counts.
Maybe the true hero of the play is the playwright, who panders to no quarter. However a contact extra emotional reasonableness in Wynona may need paid theatrical dividends. In farce, we count on to see characters, overwhelmed by conditions of their very own making, behaving at their clumsy worst. However we have to care about them sufficiently to remain attentive, and for that to occur we should imagine that they’re able to self-awareness, if not development.
Farce is a notoriously merciless style, as critic Eric Bentley has famous. It permits us, as he writes in “The Life of the Drama,” to work out our “psychic violence” by way of laughter. We all know the brutality isn’t actually taking place, so we associate with the vicious excessive jinks. However a nook have to be preserved for affection, and FastHorse spares not even River’s cat from unnatural abuse.
Krys and Mark arrive at a second of tender connection. The panting lust that permits them to override the lies that introduced them collectively isn’t sufficient farcical compensation, however Delsid and Betts have a candy, daffy chemistry.
Bowen’s River and Carmelo’s Wynona play their characters’ shortcomings to the hilt. There’s no hazard of a saccharine ending. Amy Brenneman takes over the function from a fearlessly humorous Bowen when “Fake It” strikes to Enviornment Stage in April. Carmelo, who may incorporate a second or two of introspective reflection in her uncompromisingly ferocious portrayal, will journey with the remainder of the solid to Washington, D.C.
Bean’s Tom bristles on the manner Wynona performs the race card. (“You can’t just say ‘blood money’ to win every argument,” he tells her.) However he’s carnal putty in her fingers, leaving the impression of man with an enormous id and no backbone.
The play ends with a joke that made me marvel if Heart Theatre Group has it in for cats. (I had hoped to expunge the reminiscence of the dramatized feline homicide that befell in “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” on the Kirk Douglas Theatre.) We may all use snigger proper now in these disturbing political instances, however I left the Taper with a wince.
‘Pretend It Till You Make It’
The place: Mark Taper Discussion board, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2:30 and eight p.m. Saturday, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, by way of March 9. (Name for exceptions.)
Tickets: Beginning at $35
Data: (213) 628-2772 or centertheatregroup.org
Operating time: 1 hour, half-hour