We’re in the right month, but The Thanksgiving Play isn’t even close to Thanksgiving. Instead, it impales the tradition of annual elementary school competitions, which historically celebrated a festival of friendship while ignoring the colonial slaughter.
Written by Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation), the comedy contains four white characters and is steeped in the politically correct language of white liberalism and people trying to “do better”. It’s a farce about actors in the educational theater community at school meetings planning to use the magic of improvisation to write a new Thanksgiving play.
The first production of the play, directed by Native American directors, is now being staged at the Santa Fe Playhouse, co-directed by Morningstar Angeline (Navajo, Chippewa Cree, Shoshone, Blackfeet, Latinx) and Natalie Benally (Navajo, Zuni). Production runs for about two hours without a break. In a preview performance on Friday, October 29th, the cast stumbled a little with timing and tempo in the first act, but found their groove in the second act.
The set is an early childhood classroom with a blackboard, a few child-sized tables, and a small stage with a red velvet curtain. The piece opens with a casually dressed redhead, Logan (Kate Bergeron) listening to a Thanksgiving-themed counting song for preschoolers. She prepares for rehearsals and waits for the cast to arrive: her friend Jaxton (Hunter Hans Stiebel), a street performer and “yoga guy” in a T-shirt that says “Difference Maker”; Caden Green (Patrick MacDonald), a history buff and aspiring playwright; and Alicia (Jess Haring), a Los Angeles actress whom Logan hired on a scholarship to support Native American History Month. It feels like Alicia is a Native American and they need her voice to add authenticity to her process. It may or may not be a native, but it wears a lot of turquoise. Logan, Jaxton, and Caden keep turning to her for insight and wisdom.
Pulling quote
The piece wants to ask you who you are laughing at and whether it makes sense to speak about “making room for native voices” if you’re not really listening to native voices.
Logan and Jaxton are extremely “woken up” and are afraid of offending someone or creating controversy. There is plenty of dialogue showing off the stressed-out, politically correct stupidity of stereotypical white liberals that will be familiar to anyone who spends time on social media.
The piece wants to ask you who you are laughing at and whether it makes sense to speak about “making room for native voices” if you’re not really listening to native voices. Keyword increasingly silly improvisation scenarios in which the troupe tries to emphasize a local perspective with absurd historical metaphors and in one version empty space and silence. But FastHorse shows that their motives are selfish. We see that their benign racism is still racism even as they desperately flaunt their ideas about “allies”.
The Thanksgiving Play is a confrontational theater. Due to the design, the viewing experience depends on the luggage that each viewer brings with them. For example, what Thanksgiving performances did you attend as a child? The white characters are the bum of any joke that will push buttons for anyone who sees themselves on stage – making you wonder if your own “diversity and inclusion” efforts are mostly talk. But the characters in The Thanksgiving Play aren’t just snippets. Everyone has a range of personal creative discoveries.
And so you don’t think the basic scenario is absurd, the actors are recreating vignettes from real Thanksgiving performances at the school that FastHorse found on YouTube. They range from a racist puppet show to a horribly mocking moment of experimental theater.
Haring is a comedic standout than Alicia. She tosses her hair and rolls her big, empty eyes while insisting that “playing native” just pretends to be something she isn’t. As she kept reminding Logan, this is her job as an actress. Stiebel is ideal as a stage-maker for the community, who adopts an astonishing range of culturally inappropriate accents during improvisation exercises. MacDonald brings true pathos to Caden as a playwright whose work has only been performed by 9-year-olds, and Bergeron brings nuance and subtlety to Logan’s crushing white guilt and patriarchal oppression.
The directors’ absurd approach to the material makes an effective, borderline political point about the futility of Logan’s endeavors. Unfortunately, my ability to appreciate the comedy was marred by an overly enthusiastic viewer who laughed out loud after almost every line. I longed for a slightly more inconspicuous approach on stage. It would be fascinating to see one cast playing it right now, making the comedy more naturally emerge from the dialogues. Thanksgiving songs happen every year, so we might see a different rendition next year.
Comments are closed.