About the Play:

Cherokee Family Reunion has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Female Scenes, Female/Male Scenes, and Male/Male Scenes.

Cherokee Family Reunion is a full-length comedy by Larissa FastHorse. This modern-day Brady Bunch blends two nearly grown families when a white woman marries a Cherokee man. But they, along with their ten children, quickly run into a minefield of culture shock. 

Cherokee Family Reunion is set in modern day Cherokee, NC. A Cherokee man, John, and a white woman, Emma, get married and move into his small community, surrounded by his family. But, before the wedding decorations are down, the two groups are thrown into planning the biggest family reunion in Cherokee, N.C., complete with a historical reenactment of Cherokee history. Looking for acceptance, Emma Emma bravely leads the charge to reenact the story of Henry Timberlake, a white explorer visiting the Cherokee Nation in 1761. She hopes it will help the kids realize what it is like to fit into a foreign world. Instead, cultures clash, young love blooms and history threatens to repeat itself. Through music, dance and some wild fights, everyone learns what it really means to be a family today.

Cherokee Family Reunion premiered in 2012 at the Mountainside Theatre, a large bowl-shaped venue with stadium seating at the base of the towering Smoky Mountains in Cherokee, North Carolina. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been mounted in professional theatres.

Cast: 8 to 9 female, 11 to 19 male, several minor roles any gender

About the Playwright:

Larissa FastHorse is a Native American playwright, director, and choreographer. Now based in Santa Monica, she grew up in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Sicangu Lakota Nation. She came to theater in her 30s, after having sustained a career as a ballet dancer, then having written for the small screen. Feeling that the stories she wanted to tell – whether speaking with specificity to Indigenous experiences, or lampooning unjust structures – would inevitably be watered down in Hollywood, she turned to playwriting. 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."