Paving the Road to Hell: a review of The Thanksgiving Play
--by Jon Tuttle
Last year at this time, Workshop Theatre gave us Tracy Letts’ The Minutes, a terrific play about the ways in which America disguises or embellishes its history and character. This year, just in time for our harvest holiday and midterm elections, it offers Larissa Fasthorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, which likewise challenges us to reflect on who we are, what we want, and what we intend to do about it.
The Thanksgiving Play is a wickedly funny satire about a troupe of enlightened white liberal theatre artists collaborating on a culturally-sensitive public-school production celebrating Native American Heritage Month, which by the way is November. For the sake of authenticity, they hire a Native American actor, who turns out also to be white but willing to don redface or any other color a role might require. Juggling their good intentions with historical accuracy and age-appropriateness requires elaborate moral and political contortions made even more hilarious to anyone who gets theatre jokes.
The Thanksgiving Play opened on Broadway in 2023, making it the first play written by an indigenous citizen to arrive on the Great White Way. Fasthorse is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, or Rosebud Sioux. In the previous two sentences, this reviewer, fancying himself an enlightened white liberal, was careful to use the term “indigenous” rather than “Indian,” and not to lump one Lakota nation in with the other six, and to use the word “nation” rather than “tribe.” He also feels some guilt about the phrase “Great White Way.” The Thanksgiving Play, therefore, shot its arrow straight through the snowflake in his heart. If you are like him, meaning this reviewer, you are particularly encouraged to attend.
Of course, most theatre-goers are like him, meaning liberal. After all, the drama, being the most communal of our art forms, has always been progressive in its intentions in that no one who was delighted with the status quo would ever write a play about it. With a few exceptions, theatre exists to beguile its audiences to the left. One such exception is Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, which surprises us at the end by revealing the hypocrisy of our peacenik sensibilities.
In her play, Fasthorse likewise asks if we can handle the truth. She does not create a “safe space” for libtards, or what she calls “boiled noodles.” She wrote it, she told an interviewer for American Theatre magazine, particularly for those of us practicing “performative wokeness,” or self-congratulatory cultural-sensitivity, because “they think they’re the good guys, and they think that they’ve thought of everything, and that they’re the most enlightened.” (Gulp.) Her play pillories liberals’ presumptions of moral superiority, or what we used to call “political correctness,” but now we don’t, because boy did that backfire.
The Thanksgiving Play therefore pulls back the curtain on four “revolutionaries” who believe they will create “the future of theatre and education” by devising a play that will “dispel all the myths and legends about Thanksgiving,” but without creating discomfort or guilt, all in under forty-five minutes, with only three actors, on no budget, for audiences without an attention span.
Logan, our director, is a committed vegan well-versed in woke phraseology like “empowerment,” “lived experience” and “my truth.” Emily Banks, in her portrayal, gives us a kind-hearted, right-minded ideological funambulist wary of triggering words like “Americans,” but who for one scary moment almost gives into the suggestion that, if she would just let her hair down and flip it a little, she might actually conform to the chauvinist aesthetic standards of the patriarchy.
Her boyfriend, no, partner, is Jaxton, a “professional actor” and yogi, which here is code for marginally-employed. Played here with verve by Marshall Spann, Jaxton is an endearing idealist ready to use his highly trained instrument and capacity for self-loathing to make the world a better place. To keep separate their personal and professional identities, he and Logan engage in an elaborate de-coupling exercise. It’s a hoot.
“To me, … this play is satirizing several things—white guilt and to a certain extent white fragility, but mostly how people convince themselves that somehow their inaction to get involved or open doors that have traditionally been closed is the solution to the problem.” — Jocelyn Sanders, director
Jaxton, together with resident playwright/frustrated elementary school historian Caden, (Hans Boeschen), devises the play’s most appallingly hilarious scene, in which, acknowledging holiday traditions, they toss the severed heads of Wampanoags around like footballs or frozen turkeys. What better way, they argue, to make present the native Americans conspicuously absent from their Feast Day production? What better way to expose the brutalities visited on the “savages” by European imperialists? Through Caden, Fasthorse also demonstrates the impossibility of representing a true history of Thanksgiving, there being other, earlier such occasions in what is now Florida and Texas and countless other places. To be inclusive, the play reminds us, art must be exclusive.
The antipode to all this earnestness arrives (late) in the person of Alicia (Katie Mixon), an actress! from LA. Besides being lamentably white and breathtakingly vapid, she is rather refreshing in that she makes no pretense about anything beyond her desire to pretend. In lesser plays, Alicia would be a running gag—the moll, the minx, the coquette. But here she becomes a positive character in that she models authenticity, or what Fasthorse calls “complete contentedness in who you are what you know. The beautiful thing about her is that she’s completely honest.” And while the others suspect they are “trying too hard,” Alicia has the enviable ability to shut her mind off completely.
Perhaps the cleverest thing about the play is the way it resolves. Comedy ordinarily depends on accumulation and acceleration: it should get funnier and faster as it goes, as this one does, until it arrives at a shuddering and triumphant climax. But this one does not. It goes out not with a bang, but a whimper. Unable, the troupe concludes, to complete their visionary pageant, they instead declare that the most eloquent ending their cultural compasses can lead to is an empty stage--or no play at all--and then declare that forfeit a victory. “By doing nothing,” says Logan, smugly, “we become part of the solution.” It’s a moment that brings to mind Tom Stoppard’s equation, in Jumpers, of philosophy with gymnastics.
Fasthorse deploys the play-within-a-play device to illustrate, she says, the lack of opportunities in American media for Native Americans to represent themselves. Her artistic mission, she adds, is to “do whatever I have to do to fight for the Native community. For whatever reason, I’ve been given access to rooms that 99.9 percent of my community haven’t been, so I need to speak up for them.”
It was approximately the same mission that led director Jocelyn Sanders, by now a midlands treasure, to choose The Thanksgiving Play for Workshop. “To me,” she says, “this play is satirizing several things—white guilt and to a certain extent white fragility, but mostly how people convince themselves that somehow their inaction to get involved or open doors that have traditionally been closed is the solution to the problem.”
A note to those who dislike being pilloried: fear not. The Thanksgiving Play ably exemplifies Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s maxim that one should “fight for the things you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” As Sanders points out, its messages “are subtle enough, and the comedy so cleverly written, that I think by the time most audience members get what the play is saying, they will have enjoyed it too much to be annoyed or mad.”
But therein lies a rub.
While the cast is obviously well-trained and talented, and while the costumes (by Andie Nicks) and set (by Patrick Faulds, in his swan song) serve well the purposes of the performance, and while this reviewer much appreciates Workshop’s continuing to challenge our societal values and ostensible virtues, he felt the spirit of the play was at odds with its presentation. The Thanksgiving Play is a satire, which is, as Fasthorse says, “one step up from comedy,” and therefore two steps up from farce. This production depends perhaps too much on schtick or slapstick or keystone antics. To put that another way: it seems not to have put enough faith in Fasthorse’s words.
And that’s a shame because her play is as extraordinary as Fasthorse herself. She is the recipient of, among many other awards, a Guggenheim and MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and the author of a dozen other plays that explore similar territory. She is also a frequent collaborator on projects with The Disney Channel, Apple TV, Echo Lake, Netflix, and Dreamworks.
And not for nothing, the play itself became one of the most-produced on the regional circuit after its 2018 off-Broadway premier. A reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter called it “uproarious, clever, and very, very funny,” while the New York Times noted “Satire doesn’t get much richer.”
Which is true, and so The Thanksgiving Play deserves a larger audience than we few who attended Friday’s opening. The quality of a comedy is often commensurate with the number of people who come out to laugh with it, so the reader is herewith encouraged to do his/her/their part. This reviewer should add that Friday’s performance was distracted from by a person who had his cell phone flashlight on through most of the first act. This reviewer spent much of it angry.
So consider that, and do consider seeing The Thanksgiving Play, because you’ll enjoy it. It runs at Cottingham Theatre on the campus of Columbia College from Wednesday (11/4) through Saturday (11/7, at 8:00 pm, with a closing matinee on Sunday (11/8) at 3:00. Tickets are $14 (for students), $18 (for seniors and military) and $22 (for adults).
--Jon Tuttle is author of The Trustus Collection and editor of South Carolina Onstage.