Good intentions. Bad decisions. Great fun. In Larissa FastHorse’s satirical comedy The Thanksgiving Play, a troupe of really well-meaning theater artists dream of creating something revolutionary: a culturally sensitive, totally inoffensive Thanksgiving school pageant that finally gives a voice to Native Americans. Finding said Native Americans... isn’t so simple. And that’s when things start to get absurd. Sending up a whole feast of social issues, this bitingly funny play roasts everything right, wrong, and woke in America.
If history is written by the victors, it’s being rewritten — still by the victors — in The Thanksgiving Play. In Larissa FastHorse’s satire, a group of liberal-minded white people gathers to devise a play about Thanksgiving that will honor a Native American perspective on the atrocities Pilgrims committed without any insight into an actual Native American perspective. Their project, as you’d expect, goes wrong quickly. The problem is that The Thanksgiving Play intentionally hurtles its characters toward a dead end — like Wile E. Coyote toward a tunnel entrance that’s just drawn on the side of a rock — and it gets stuck once they crash. It takes them down but never justifies why we’re here with them in the first place.
The Thanksgiving Play makes fun of earnest white liberals acting in overly socially conscious ways, in much the same way as Bill Maher does every Friday night. Sure, have at it. But the shared derision is, in essence, no different to the fulminations against “woke” and “political correctness” of the right wing. The end result is the same: the “woke” and “politically correct” end up as being seen as the villains, rather than those brazenly and unapologetically attacking and destroying the rights of minorities. Are the white liberal “woke” the enemy of progress at this cultural moment, or do they just make for an easier comedy target than those succeeding in their efforts to attack the most marginalized groups in society? Perhaps playwrights will focus on their imaginations on bigger, clear and present monsters—and quit the lazy shooting of fish in the barrel. In the climate of now, these jokes are just adding to a depressingly destructive chorus.
Digital Rush
Price: $43
Where: TodayTix.com
When: 9am on the day of the show.
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Subject to availability.
General Rush
Price: $45
Where: Hayes Theatre box office
When: Available 2 hours prior to curtain.
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Determined at the discretion of the box office. Subject to daily availability.
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