A satirical farce that broadly lampoons excessive political correctness, The Thanksgiving Play regards a high school drama teacher and several more white folk who struggle to devise a November holiday pageant that will not trigger anybody’s sensitivities.
The teacher who curates the event, Logan (Jennifer Bareilles), already happens to be in hot water with the district’s parents from her recent student production of The Iceman Cometh.
Logan has garnered grants to fund this latest endeavor that allows the hiring of Alicia (Margo Seibert), a Native American actor, to develop a script in association with Jaxton (Greg Keller), a “yoga dude” slash mall busker (and also Logan’s boyfriend), and Caden (Jeffrey Bean), a middle-aged history teacher who aspires to be a playwright.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Early on, Logan asserts her noble intentions to the others. “I am a vegan,” declares Logan. “However, I want to lift up the acknowledgement that although my sensitivity about the slaughter of millions of animals, including 45 million turkeys, is valid, I am conscious of not allowing my personal issues to take up more space in the room than the justified anger of the Native people around this idea of Thanksgiving in our post-colonial society.”
So she avows, anyway. Logan eventually is dismayed to discover that Alicia’s Native origin is but one among six different ethnic identities that she assumes to nab jobs: That’s how Alicia got to be the third understudy for Jasmine in a 20-minute Aladdin staged at Disneyland. Meanwhile, an over-thinking Jaxon contributes nothing helpful, while Caden earnestly gasses away about various Thanksgiving observances based upon Indigenous massacres and settlers’ disasters.
It becomes obvious that hair-flipping Alicia offers few insights other than how to use sex appeal to further a career. None of Caden’s exhausting research seems suitable. So Logan desperately resorts to leading everyone in dramatic improvisations upon the traditional 1621 Pilgrim story.
Everyone’s well-meaning exertions finally add up to a big, fat zero.
Larissa FastHorse, an award-winning writer of Native American origin, makes her New York debut as an author with the Playwrights Horizons production of The Thanksgiving Play, which opened on Monday.
FastHorse deals out a bright satirical notion that tickles up plentiful laughter during its initial scenes. Then the show and its humor gradually wind down as 85 minutes tick away. The piece registers finally as a clever sketch that proves insufficiently developed. (Perhaps the scenario needs to be augmented by introducing additional characters, such as a PTA member, a school official, or a student, who can provide voices other than these four self-involved people.)
Beyond the play’s main targets of well-meaning liberal idiocy and white blindness regarding American history, the humor tends to be scattershot since it also mocks, among other topics, vegans, Disney memes, yoga, bro behavior, educational theater, meditation exercises, and how sexy beats smarts.
More significant than those minor riffs are four short interludes that FastHorse inserts within her story to illustrate bizarre ways that educators have erroneously depicted Thanksgiving to youngsters. These actual songs involving Pilgrims, turkeys, buffaloes, Natives, and soldiers have been cleverly realized by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, the director, and his designers, with puppets and costumes. Unfortunately, neither the playwright, the director, nor even the program bother to inform the audience that these ridiculous portrayals once were actually performed by children.
Although The Thanksgiving Play does not achieve its potential as a satire—and the acting of this production is surprisingly indifferent—at least it contemplates an important subject. Certainly this comedy set inside a classroom provokes serious concern over how well history is taught to kids today.
The Thanksgiving Play opened November 5, 2018, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through December 2. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
