“The Thanksgiving Play,” by Larissa FastHorse, has a simple but explosive plot. Four white American actors are charged with creating a short play about Thanksgiving suitable for elementary school students. Sounds simple. It isn’t; not in our era.
Written in 2015, FastHorse’s play had its off-Broadway premiere in 2018. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the play opened on Broadway in 2023, and productions are now running across the country. Someday, it may be seen as a period piece, but for now, the play speaks tellingly of a time rampant with political correctness. The Fort Lewis College production opened last weekend and runs through Saturday, with talkback sessions after each performance.
If you go
WHAT: Fort Lewis College presents “The Thanksgiving Play,” a satire by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Felicia Lansbury Meyer.
WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
WHERE: MainStage Theatre, Drama Building, FLC, 1000 Rim Drive.
TICKETS: Adults $28, FLC faculty and staff $15, non-FLC students $15, free to FLC students. www.durangoconcerts.com. Plenty of free parking.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit https://tinyurl.com/3p4mjnaw.
The plot: In the midst of Native American Heritage Month, Logan, a public school drama teacher, has a government grant to create a short play about “Thanksgiving.” The work is for an elementary school audience and key words are “appropriate” and “devised.” Yes, the guidelines themselves are politically correct. In addition, the four-member cast must include one Native American actor.
Logan (played with ferocity by Katelin Bowie) is a teacher whose career is already in jeopardy for staging Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” She’s anxious about her job and the grant. She’s hired her boyfriend, local actor Jaxton (a loosely-zen, engaging Calvin Marshall) and Caden, a nerdy elementary school history teacher (the crisply funny Travis Carlson), and Alicia (a confident and alluring Evie Kelley), presumably a Native American actor from Los Angeles. Alicia, however, is white but has played Native American women, and Spanish, and Latin and other ethnicities in her career as a Hollywood bombshell.
When Logan assembles her cast, she knows she’s up against grant requirements. Still, the four stumble through what’s “appropriate” by using a process known as “devised theatre.” The four come up with story ideas, “improv” them, discard them and move on. These include vegan rejections of Thanksgiving as a “holiday of death.” Later, parallel scenes dramatize feminine and masculine tropes, which end in mansplaining the bloody tale of the Pequot Massacre. Ludicrous costumes and rambunctious fight choreography almost spin out of control – enacted by the two men and viewed with horror by the women. Well done.
The Massacre enactment may be one reason that triggered FLC’s warning label. There’s plenty of language explosions that are politically incorrect, so the Massacre battle isn’t the only spot where satire stings.
Directed by Felicia Lansbury Meyer, “The Thanksgiving Play” runs 85 minutes without interruption. Set in a public school classroom with a movable white board that serves as a projection screen for other misguided interpretations of the traditional Thanksgiving story, the play unfurls quickly. Meyer and her able four-member cast plus a large backstage crew have mounted a quicksilver show that questions one of America’s most basic myths. Credit Meyer and Technical Director James Padilla and his crew for a sharp rendering of a complicated script.
The message is: Change the storytellers and you change the story.
“The Thanksgiving Play” has several inside jokes. One is stipulated by the grant: a new interpretation of the American myth and pageant must be both appropriate to our time and developed improvisationally, or “devised.”
A devised theatrical production means it must be invented by the cast presenting it. The form is the result of a process, and its history dates back to 16th century Europe where traveling players invented productions by riffing on themes.
Commedia dell-arte companies grew out of this tradition, and the practice has experienced a resurgence when American Realism dominated theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a collaborative method that is used on college campuses and in professional companies today, a way of producing a new work without a preexisting script.
A production can start with any idea or emotion or real-life event. The goal is an agreed-upon script, which can then present commercially. In our time, devised contemporary theatre has been championed by South African playwright Athol Fugard and American playwright and Columbia University Professor Anne Bogart. The process will be used when FLC mounts its next production, “Behind Me is Silence,” opening Nov. 8, and devised by Suzy DiSanto and her students. The work will be created, invented and/or improvised by those in the company. The technique has been adopted before at FLC, most notably by Teresa Carson.
It could be argued that the villain in “The Thanksgiving Play,” by Larissa FastHorse is white, well-meaning American liberals, those who generally fill the seats in the audience for plays like hers. Aware of American history and its turnings, white liberals decry the story of conquest and subjugation but do little to change how it is played out in time. And a hero? By a stretch, the character Alicia. She’s the only one who doesn’t give in to the agony of cultural mistakes. She just plays the roles she’s given, especially woman as sexy beast.
One New York Times critic wrote: “The ridiculous agonizing of the four 'teaching artists' produces brutal laughs at the expense of well-meaning liberals who conceal ordinary prejudice under the mask of 'performative wokeness.' They want to help but in their fear of offending are the least helpful of all.”
Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.
