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.
Carden is absolutely hilarious as the airheaded Alicia. Considering that she first rose to prominence playing the omniscient artificial intelligence Janet on The Good Place, the role really shows off her range. Sullivan makes Caden's insistence on correcting uses of the term 'pilgrims' with 'well, they called themselves Separatists' funnier every time, Foley admirably keeps a straight face while demonstrating how his character's sensitivity can so easily run all the way back around to ignorance, and Finneran gets more and more hilariously frazzled as Logan's goals collapse around her. The next Thanksgiving is more than half a year away at this point, but the questions posed by The Thanksgiving Play are worth pondering at any time.
FastHorse effectively roasts her characters as turkeys, trussed by their own self-consciousness. In a swift 90 minutes, The Thanksgiving Play delivers solid laughs at the expense of targets that are admittedly, at this point, not unfamiliar: clueless liberals so busy holding space that they don’t get around to filling it with anything. What the play doesn’t do is provide much sense of a better solution to the questions that its hapless theater folks are stultified by. This absence leaves you with a question, at the end, that is double-edged: Where the representation of identity and history are concerned, is nothing good enough?
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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