Review: THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at Washington University Performing Arts

Columbus has been successfully erased from America’s list of civically sacred feast days.  (He was such a naughty boy!)   Now it seems a big bunch of us liberals are eagerly taking a tomahawk to the scalps of all those Puritans we celebrate on Thanksgiving—‘cause, let’s face it, they were pretty naughty too.

“The Thanksgiving Play” played last week at Wash U.  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.  (Is it the traditionally American “theater” or the artsy “theatre”?  And just what the hell is a “dramaturg” anyway?)  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 plays Jaxon, Logan’s boy-friend (or “partner” or whatever the sensitive term is).  He makes 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 plays 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 “devised” (and hence unscripted) play.  (“The Swedes are way ahead of us.  They haven’t used a script in years.”)  Mr. Cohn makes Caden innocent and desperately eager.

All those grants have allowed the hiring of one PROFESSIONAL performer.  Alicia, a wannabe starlet from L.A., is played by Raquel Elle Brouwer—who is 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 is a real hoot!

Now author Larissa FastHorse had been frustrated in writing Indian plays.  “They’re impossible to cast!”  So she decided to write a play with Indian themes that could be played by a white cast.  And this play became one of the ten most frequently-produced plays in America.  I empathize.  I’m a member of the Osage nation, and an Osage play I wrote was a longtime wallflower until last month when it was presented by a Native American Festival in Colorado.

The irony!  The audience at The Thanksgiving Play was filled with Wash U students, and I’m sure that they spend most of their college careers obeying—and fearing—the woke diktats of their professors and student-elite leaders.   Yet here they roared with laughter at all these anti-woke pranks.  It was like a Saturnalia, where all rules were off and they had Kings-X against punishment for sacrilege.

Terminology:  Most Osages I know call themselves “Indians”.  “Native American” is a label that anyone born here can claim.  “Indigenous American”, let’s face it, is such a White Man’s term.

The final irony—the program:

• Most (but not all) of the small bios of the cast and crew were graced with those little verbal genuflections to the gods of gender confusion—“he/him, she/her, he/they(?)”.

• The program had that “Land Acknowledgement” with which so many arts groups insist on irritating us.  Wash U’s program for this show included the most verbose and expansive version of this I’ve seen.  Basically such proclamations condescendingly say, “Yes, we stole your land.  Are we going to give it back?  Duh!  No!  We don’t mind broadcasting this smug statement that ‘We won, you lost!’  If that makes you happy, cool!”

Nevertheless The Thanksgiving Play directed by Andrea Urice at Wash U was a total delight!

 

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