"The Thanksgiving Play" at Washing ton University: “Down goes Thanksgiving in a merry rout!”

“The Thanksgiving Play” played last week (November 22 – 24) at Wash University.  The whole evening rang with irony.  The play is a clever satiric piece from 2018 by Larissa Fasthorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota nation.  It’s very like an extended Saturday Night Live sketch.  It pops almost every virtue-filled “woke” moral balloon.  It flings a scattershot barrage at cultural hypersensitivity, dietary fashions, “devised” theater, color-and-gender-blind casting (as well as at race-specific casting demands).  It spoofs theatrical affectation. It mocks the battles against cultural appropriation, speciesism, racism, sexism, and sexual binarity. 

We find ourselves in a grade-school classroom where Logan, a deliciously woke young teacher, has been tasked with producing a new Thanksgiving play for the school children.  She has scraped up a handful of grants from various arts bureaucracies to contrive a play that is sensitive to all the injustices heaped on the noble Native Americans by invading white guys.  After all, it’s “Indigenous American Month”.  But Logan is burdened with a petition by 300 parents demanding her firing.  Logan is delightfully—and intensely—played by Coco Jones.  

And we meet her cast:

Jacob Elliott played Jaxon, Logan’s boy-friend (or “partner” or whatever the sensitive term is).  He made Jaxon the spitting image of Andy on “Parks and Rec”—kind of adorable and super-enthusiastic—but utterly clueless.  Jaxon is a street-performer and yoga teacher.

Zachary Cohn played Caden, a history teacher.  He has long dreamed of being a playwright, and he arrives with many scenes pre-written—though this is supposed to be a “derived” (and hence unscripted) play.  (“The Swedes are way ahead of us.  They haven’t used a script in years.”)  Mr. Cohn made Caden innocent and desperately eager.

All those grants have allowed the hiring of one PROFESSIONAL performer.  Alicia, a wannabe starlet from L.A., was played by Raquel Elle Brouwer—who was leggy and casually sexy and just perfect for this role.   Alicia is confident in her profession, though she’s performed mostly at Disneyworld, and doesn’t know “upstage” from “downstage”.

But is she INDIGENOUS?  No.  Her head-shot looked indigenous—beads, braids, buckskin, etc., but Alicia’s agent had made her make a dozen differently ethnic head-shots.  Her only exposure to “chiefs” is watching football after Thanksgiving dinner.  Well, what difference does it make?  After all, an actress’s job is to pretend to be somebody who she isn’t, right?  And, by the way, Alicia consistently refers to herself with the unfashionably sexist word “actress” rather than “actor”.

Well, there is a wild thrashing to arrive at some socio-politically correct version of the Thanksgiving story.  At one point the guys and gals … er … the men and women (if these are still socially acceptable terms) go off to work separately.  Logan and Alicia touchingly exchange mentor/mentee roles in a search for contentedness. 

Jaxon and Caden (well, they’re boys) come back with togas and swords and a bloody battle story which ends with them playing soccer with decapitated Indian heads from the prop room.   (Shades of “The Man Who Would Be King.”  Such fun!)    Alicia is happily playing a game her family invented—turkey bowling, where frozen Butterball turkeys are hurled to knock down wooden blocks.  (“Butterballs aren’t really shaped like balls.”)

In the end it is decided that the absence of Native Americans on stage is far more dramatically powerful than their presence.  In fact the absence of everybody is super-dramatic.  I was reminded of an article some years ago in The Onion in which 23 blank pages were discovered in the files of Samuel Beckett—who, near his end, had been writing more and more sparsely.  Academia was in an ecstatic frenzy to analyze this, the most important of Beckett’s final writings.

The whole evening was a real hoot! “The Thanksgiving Play” directed by Andrea Urice at Washington University was a total delight. Information on upcoming productions is available at the Performing Arts Department web site.