Broadway audiences have a lot to be thankful for with Larissa Fasthorse’s timely new comedy Thanksgiving Play, which opened Thursday at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater and carves up white privilege and the contradictions of those who are all to eager to pat themselves on the back for their wokeness and performative ally-ship.
The play is set on the frontlines of the modern culture wars: a public high school classroom (deftly designed by Riccardo Hernandez. There, a frazzled drama teacher (Katie Finneran, “Wonderfalls”) has lined up a bunch of foundation grants to stage an updated Thanksgiving play that will offer an indigenous-friendly corrective to the traditional Pilgrim-focused narrative. A failed actress (who lasted all of six weeks in L.A.) who recently ran afoul of local sensibilities with a high school production of The Iceman Cometh, Finneran’s Logan has something to prove.
She’s assembled a mismatched team to support her new envelope-pushing masterpiece: a self-described “actor slash yoga dude” from the community, played with vain hubris by “Felicity” alum Scott Foley; a nebbishy history teacher and would-be playwright (Chris Sullivan, late of “This Is Us”); and a ringer from Los Angeles, a beautiful and none-too-bright actress brought to glam Hollywood life by “The Good Place” breakout D’Arcy Carden. Finneran’s Logan is deflated to learn that Carden’s Alicia — whom she mistakenly thought had a tribal heritage — is merely a white brunette whose looks allow her to play a wide range of “ethnic” characters, and dons new accessories for each of her six different head shots. (“The point is, we’re actors. We act. That’s the job,” she explains. “Is Lumière a real candle?”)
Fasthorse absolutely nails the language of well-meaning white liberals — from the gift of a glass water jug “made with recycled glass from broken windows in housing projects” to Finneran and Foley’s elaborate “decoupling” ritual to defuse even the faintest whiff of tension. More tellingly, she also exposes the ways in which these supposedly enlightened folks can twist themselves into such knots that their words and actions have the opposite of their intended effect.
“Are we being fair to the Pilgrims?” Foley’s Jaxton wonders at one point, his pursuit of the politically correct choices blinding him to his own prejudices and privilege. At another point, he admits, “Do you know how hard it is for a straight white male to feel ‘less than’ in this world? I don’t know that I’ve ever truly felt it in my life.”
Witness, too, the quartet’s convoluted attempts to re-center the Thanksgiving narrative without attempting to play Native Americans themselves — a conundrum that leads to increasingly hilarious exercises that lay bare the futility of the whole endeavor. Jaxton proves the ultimate target, and foil, throwing himself into the re-creation of a mass slaughter of the Pequot people in a misguided effort to “get a Native American presence into our play.”
The cast’s brainstorming and rehearsal sessions, skillfully directed by Rachel Chavkin, are occasionally interrupted by video projections (designed by David Bengali) in which school children act out cringe-worthy Thanksgiving skits, many of which appear to have been lifted almost verbatim from actual teachers’ Pinterest boards.
Fasthorse has a serious intent with Thanksgiving Play, but she craftily serves her message in a laugh-stuffed satire that is both broad in its characterizations and knife-sharp in its incisiveness. These are characters who are not used to finding themselves on life’s carving board, basted and roasted and ready for consumption. But they make one delicious comic meal. Pass the gravy!
Culture Sauce 