The Guggenheim Foundation has announced their 100th class of fellows, and one of them is playwright and Arizona State University professor Larissa Fasthorse.
Fasthorse is planning to use the stipend from her fellowship to continue a project she’s been doing with the Public Theater in New York: creating a theatrical adaptation of one of the first English-language novels. The novel is called "Oroonoko," and it was written in 1688 by a woman named Aphra Behn.
Fasthorse joined The Show a few months ago talking about her adaptation of “Peter Pan,” where she had to navigate the tricky task of humanizing the female and Indigenous characters — which meant changing some fundamental elements of a story that generations of audiences have gotten used to hearing in a very specific way.
Fasthorse joined The Show to discuss how “Oroonoko” presents a different set of challenges.
Full conversation
LARISSA FASTHORSE: The novel itself is bonkers. Like it is out there. There's a lot. But our process is going to be with my longtime collaborator, Michael John Garces, who's a fellow professor of practice with me at ASU. We are going to, and have been doing a community engaged process. We're interviewing and talking with folks who feel that they are descendants in some way of the themes of the novel.
So, so far it's been a lot of Indigenous folks, in the New York area, it's been, folks that are, descendants from enslaved people, that sort of thing. And we're, you know, seeing where they think maybe some of these themes from the novel may still resonate today or be important to their community to uplift.
SAM DINGMAN: Could you give a brief summary of what happens in the original story of "Oroonoko”?
FASTHORSE: Sure. Yeah, so "Oroonoko” is a story that's told as if it's a first person account. So it's in the first person. So it's told as if this woman is experiencing this journey where she goes to Suriname and meets this enslaved person who was formerly an African prince in Ghana, and has been, well, all people have been wrongfully enslaved, of course, but he had been betrayed specifically for, you know, by his own, family in some way.
So, she hears the, the character, the main character in this novel, hears the whole story of what happened to this man, this Prince Oroonoko, and, and how we ended up in Suriname enslaved. And then it continues with what happens there, where he ends up meeting his wife, who was also enslaved, and they end up re-meeting in Suriname. He thought she was dead. And finds her there. And there's also a rebellion of the enslaved folks in Suriname who pair up with the Indigenous people.
DINGMAN: So these are all things that are always revolutionary to write about but seem to be particularly revolutionary in 1688.
FASTHORSE: Yes.
DINGMAN: How in your opinion, were these themes dealt with in the original text, and what stands out to you about the way that the author, Aphra Behn, approached it?
FASTHORSE: Yeah, I mean, I think obviously from our contemporary eyes, we can look at it and be like, oh, wow, I mean, she spends, you know, two full pages describing this man's body, right? So there's that which is like, you know, one go her, but also it's a little, you know, the way that she's tokenizing this, this human, is, is not great.
But also, if you look at the time, it, many people would argue there's also one of the very first abolitionist English, English-language abolitionist pieces of literature, that it was really, saying, you know, the slavery thing went really badly and that there are some good white folks and some good enslavers, but mostly they're like, yeah, they're, they're not good people. That was pretty revolutionary at the time.
DINGMAN: Yes, to write a novel that questions slavery and invokes the humanity of enslaved people during a time of widespread slavery, that seems pretty remarkable.
FASTHORSE: Yeah, and to be a woman doing it, you know.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So can you share anything about what you're hearing in these community listening sessions that stands out for you?
FASTHORSE: Yeah. We had a, a group that the public brought together, primarily, folks that consider themselves probably descendants of enslaved people that were brought here against their will, right? And it was interesting because a lot of the folks, you know, that, that we're dealing with on this project, we're worried, and where are they going to think? Are they gonna be upset?
We're gonna, people are feeling a little like we should apologize and everyone dies, especially the main characters who are, who are enslaved people. And they're like, Oh yeah, tell this. Yeah, everybody should die.
And then we're like, Oh, OK. Like, because, you know, I think similar to myself, like coming from a Native American perspective, right? We're like, no, people need to know what really happened.
DINGMAN: I wanted to ask you, you know, when we spoke previously about your work adapting Peter Pan. You said at the time that you were, literally worried that the project might quote end your career, because it, you know, it's such a famous and beloved text and people have all these associations with it. And “Oroonoko,” no disrespect to Aphra Behn, it's not quite in the same category.
FASTHORSE: No, definitely not. I'm not getting angry, DMs about adapting, yeah, yeah.
DINGMAN: What is that like for you creatively? I mean, do you, does that give you more wiggle room? How does that resonate for you in terms of the challenge of finding the right expression of this?
FASTHORSE: More freedom, for sure. This adaptation, and, and part of it was, you know, originally the public had asked me to do a classical adaptation. That was the assignment. And I was like, I'm not putting my name next to Shakespeare.
Like, I just, it makes me nuts that, so often Black and brown folks have to put their name next to Shakespeare's or another great white man to be considered, you know, legitimate, and you've made it. And I just didn't want that to happen. And so this novel instead it's still a classical piece, still the same period. You know, I was really excited to be able to adapt a woman's voice instead.
DINGMAN: It strikes me that with Aphra Behn, it's particularly interesting because in addition to the fact that she is not Shakespeare or a figure like that. There's also very little that's known about who she really was at all, right? I mean, there's a tremendous amount of mystery surrounding her, her origins.
FASTHORSE: There's a lot unknown. And I think that's fairly common, right? I think we're lucky that we even know that she was a woman, right? Because so often in that time, you know, these women had to write under a pseudonym, or, or that she made a female main character.
Like often again, at that time, it would have been a man doing all of this, you know, it would, she would have hidden under, you know, like, well, this is OK because a man, it's a man's point of view. You know what I mean? It's a male story.
But there is a lot of mystery, and there's a lot of unknowns. There's a lot of speculation about the first personness of the story. And, and what that came from, what sort of, things she actually participated in her life regarding enslaved people and, and travel. So there's a lot of speculation that I'm actually still just getting into myself.
DINGMAN: I could imagine there being this sort of inverse pressure with somebody like Aphra Behn where, if you wanna adapt Shakespeare, one of the things that I, I, it seems like you can kind of count on is like, sure, granted, we all love Shakespeare, everybody respects Shakespeare.
We don't have to like, you know, elevate Shakespeare, but with a writer like Aphra Behn, who's not as well known, I could imagine there being some pressure to I don't know, not want to stray too far from what she did, so that more people know her name, and is that something you're navigating at all?
FASTHORSE: Well, I am now. Thanks, Sam. I wasn't until this moment. [LAUGHS] No, no, honestly, because we're doing it in this unusual way with the input of contemporary communities, you know, it could end up being exactly the same, for all I know. You know, I don't actually know yet.
It could end up being set, you know, on the island of Manhattan. It could end up being set, you know, so many places. I don't know. I really trust this process. Michael John and I always say that our process is our art form as much as the final thing is.
