The Thanksgiving Play, at Playwrights Horizons, is a clever piece, with an interesting idea, by a sharp young playwright. Its only problem is that it’s not nearly as provocative as it thinks it is.
Larissa FastHorse, who wrote The Thanksgiving Play, is a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of the Sicangu Lakota Nation. That is, she is a Native American. Her play means to look at the received truths of American history and cast a skeptical gaze at them. She has a creative mind and a knack for clever dialogue, which makes for a generally pleasurable evening of entertainment. And she has a sensibility and biography that gives a certain frisson to her puncturing of patriotic pieties. But her play quickly wears out its welcome, because it is not actually surprising or revelatory to suggest that pilgrim-native exchange celebrated by hoary elementary-school traditions was not nearly so equitable as some might believe. (Related: Does anyone still believe that?)
Still, the play, which opened tonight at Playwrights’ upstairs Peter Jay Sharp space, packs a satirical and visual punch, if not an ideological one.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★★ review here.]
It opens with actors dressed as three schoolkid pilgrims and one hefty turkey waddling in front stage left, in front of the act curtain, and singing a reasonably offensive little ditty about the “Twelve Days of Thanksgiving” (though they stop at nine), reciting the litany of what “the natives gave to me.” The suggestion is that this song comes from a website designed to provide lesson ideas to preschool teachers. It’s delightfully awkward, a funny moment.
Then we move into the main action, set in a standard-issue all-American classroom. It’s the drama room, with window cards for school productions hung along the wall, and we meet the well-intentioned drama teacher and her even more well-intentioned boyfriend, a yogi and occasional musician. They are earnest and woke, and so are of course ridiculous.
Jennifer Bareilles plays Jennifer, who is determined to put on a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play, and also one that satisfies the requirements of the many and various grants she has received to fund it. Greg Keller plays Jaxton, that supersensitive boyfriend, who wants to help but also, in the way of all helpful white-male allies, is extravagantly offended by his own straight-white-male-ness. An open casting call has yielded Caden (Jeffrey Bean), an elementary-school teacher and aspiring actor who is thrilled to finally have a chance to perform. And Jennifer has used a grant to hire Alicia (Margo Seibert), a vacant L.A. actress who, by the terms of that grant, should be Native American, and whose now-former agent has made sure she can play all sorts of ethnic types. All of the performances are fine; none of the characters is more than a caricature.
There are obvious hijinks to ensue, and ensue they do. Director Moritz von Stuelpnagel keep the energy high and the jokes flying; the cast has perhaps the most fun of anyone in the tiny theater. There are more interstitial elementary-school-pageant bits, also seemingly copped from real teachers’ guides, and there is a general feeling of mania, culminating in a laugh-out-loud final explosive breakdown.
It’s fun, but there are no explosive ideas. We know — maybe not everyone, but certainly those who subscribe to upper-middle-brow off-Broadway theater companies — that settlers were horrible to pilgrims. We know that this country’s founding myths are, so to speak, whitewashed. And we know that even those who try to be responsible about these matters can in fact be fools.
Yes, well-intentioned liberals can be ridiculous. We knew this already; we’ve been to Park Slope.
The Thanksgiving Play opened November 5, 2018, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through December 2. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
