OnStage: 'Average Family' learns simple life

It was an incident with familiar outlines -- city kids visit a county fair and marvel that milk comes from cows. For playwright Larissa FastHorse, though, this epiphany several years ago coincided perfectly with a play she was working on at the time.

"They thought it was really cool," FastHorse said of the youngsters she was chaperoning at the Los Angeles County Fair. "But it hurt me that they were missing that connection to the land that is essential and beautiful."

Urban rediscovery of rural values informs FastHorse's script, "Average Family," which opens tonight at Children's Theatre Company (CTC).

Her protagonists are an American Indian family that finds itself forced to live as it might have in 1840 -- only as part of a reality TV show. Competing with the white Monroe family, the Roubidouxes find themselves at a bit of a loss without the middle-class comforts of their city home, and in the process relearn simple truths of the Earth, their culture and what it means to be a family.

FastHorse comes from Lakota and European parentage and is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in South Dakota. She grew up in Pierre, S.D., dividing time between the ballet studio and the prairie, where she could sit and ponder the vast sky and rolling fields.

When she wasn't reading, she was writing. Even now, living in Santa Monica, Calif., she takes her laptop down to the ocean, where the open horizon recalls the Dakota countryside.

"Coming from a rural setting, I consider that land my home, part of who I am," she said before a day of rehearsal at CTC.

The theater found FastHorse, who primarily writes for film and TV, through N. Bird Runningwater, a programmer for Indian Initiatives at the Sundance Institute in Utah. Peter Brosius, artistic director of the CTC, asked Runningwater for some writers whose work might translate well to theater, and FastHorse's name came up. Elissa Adams, CTC's director of new play development, liked FastHorse's storytelling and her sense of character ("the story was very clear but the characters were complex"). The theater's invitation to write startled FastHorse because of its wide berth.

"They just asked me what I wanted to write about," she said. "It's a rare gift to trust me enough to let me do what I wanted to do."

Reality TV is nearly inescapable these days, in its many forms. Perhaps the best parallel for what FastHorse concocted would be "Frontier House," a 2002 PBS show inspired by the British show "The 1900 House." In the PBS show, families were plopped into the wilderness with all the discomforts of the 19th century. FastHorse added a gimmick, in which the families compete for an RV, and the rules stipulate that they cannot walk away from the contest.

Changing the setting

FastHorse set her play in Los Angeles, mecca of TV reality and fiction. She and Adams agreed to change the locale to Minnesota for a dash of local humor and a chance to use the state's geography for shaping personalities.

The change also slid the reality-show gimmick to the background and let the characters rise.

"The device was overshadowing everything," FastHorse said.

Less recognizable as a satire of reality TV, the play now focuses more on the compromises families make, and how they sometimes sleepwalk through their lives. Placing them in hard circumstances, FastHorse forces both the Monroes and the Roubidouxes to work together and rediscover their connections.

FastHorse's work slyly intuits politics and history into the relationship between white and Indian families, using allegories rather than blunt moralism.

"I'm really an advocate of moving beyond 'issue theater' to the next level," said FastHorse. "I think the play does some teaching, but it doesn't hit you over the head. I try not to make the judgments."

Adams feels that the playwright has "a clear-eyed vision" of her heritage and she "lets the politics happen."

Director Brosius brought FastHorse into quite a bit of rehearsal, she said, constantly asking for her thinking on a particular scene and for explanations of how to roast corn over a fire or how to fish without a pole.

"These are urban kids for the most part," FastHorse said of the cast. "Peter has created an environment where there is lots of talking and educating."

As for the set, FastHorse found it "truly bizarre" that designer Skip Mercier was able to distill "an entire world on a prairie" onto the CTC stage.

"It was important to me to have true nature, grounded earth, onstage," she said. "I feel most like myself when there are no buildings around."

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299