Review: THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at CAA Theatre

Note: This review contains a mild spoiler.

In December of 2016, I was putting my MFA in dramaturgy to good use as a script reader for a program called Native Voices, hosted by the Autry Museum in Los Angeles. The program fostered and premiered works by Indigenous artists, and would send out contest submissions to be critiqued and evaluated for potential development. When a copy of an early draft of THE THANKSGIVING PLAY by Larissa FastHorse crossed my path, I knew it was something special. “This script is so on point about the fetishization of culture, identity politics, and the inability to move forward over words in regards to ‘allies’ on the left that it's almost painful to read,” I wrote. “Plus, it’s just so very funny and well constructed. Overall—someone should put this on!”

In the years to follow, I watched with delight as someone did, in fact, put this on, and FastHorse’s play became the first known work by an Indigenous woman to have a Broadway debut. Now, THE THANKSGIVING PLAY has made it to Toronto as part of Mirvish’s 2024/25 season, programmed a little earlier in the fall to suit the Canadian Thanksgiving crowd, but still as on point and vital as ever. Director Vinetta Strombergs’ production looks at what happens when we try to honour someone who isn’t in the room, how a story repeated enough times has the power to become entrenched truth, and why we claim the facts about history must be spoken, yet deem them too gross, complex, or offensive to be borne in the present.

FastHorse’s fast-paced script invites us to the first rehearsal of an upcoming devised educational production for children to celebrate Native American Heritage Month around the story of Thanksgiving. Anahita Dehbonehie’s classroom set teems with storage: bags of athletic gear, play posters, racks of costumes and stray school supplies, ripe for awkward incorporation into an increasingly awkward show.

Logan (Rachel Cairns), the play’s director, is on thin ice with the school board’s parents after a poor programming choice for teens; she’s trying to win her way back into their good graces by having secured every arts grant under the sun to produce an accurate, politically-correct work that will also entertain the kids for 45 minutes while trying to hide her vegan distaste for the turkey slaughter.

Her boyfriend Jaxton (Colin Doyle), a yoga practitioner and farmer’s market street performer, namastes by her side as they “decouple” in preparation for the workplace. Hyperaware of identity politics and privilege, sharing pronouns, traumas, and space, they may as well be a right-wing meme emblazoned with “this is the future liberals want.” Cairns and Doyle make the most of their height difference (he’s shorter) as they wrap together, jockeying for physical and metaphorical position and constantly testing the waters of who feels “less than” whom.

They welcome Caden (Craig Lauzon), a history teacher whose lifelong dream is to hear his words spoken on stage, who arrives with hundreds of pages of meticulous notes. Last to arrive is Jada Rifkin’s deliciously vacant Alicia (a-lee-cee-a), the crop top-wearing actress from L.A. who Logan’s hired with the grant money based on a headshot of her in braids and turquoise, and whose presence provokes a constant, delightfully nervous giggle from Lauzon’s starstruck Caden.

Caden is interested in history stemming back thousands of years and the various groups that also stake claims on being the first true Thanksgiving, but most of these ideas are out of budget or just plain frightening to director Logan, who insists that, while Alicia’s voice is the most important in the room, Logan has final say on what the play portrays. Of course, it soon becomes clear that Alicia’s contributions will be less than helpful; the former Disneyland cast member has little interest in doing anything but starring in a ready-made script, and her identity may not be exactly as advertised.

With no social-justice-approved perspective to guide them, the devisers face panic and chaos. “Good drama is, at its core, truth,” posits Jaxton, arguing that theatre requires conflict, but it soon becomes clear that the characters and the school board above them treat even mild challenge or discomfort as an evil to be avoided at all costs rather than a necessary step in growth, and that historical accuracy is unfortunately full of brutal, discomfiting concepts and words. The characters may be uber-enlightened, but are still ill-equipped to deal with or handle difficult questions without retreating behind walls of obfuscatory language, twisting themselves into cringing knots until immobility seems the only option.

Alicia’s very presence, on the other hand, is an ode to simplicity; in Rifkin’s hilarious portrayal, she’s direct while the others are long-winded, content while they writhe, cutting through the knots by being her best basic self. She’s long ago accepted that her talent is making people look at her, and argues that, like her ability to cry on cue, she believes anyone can play anyone or anything, as long as they pretend with conviction. Rifkin prances about the stage, bending over and stretching with the practiced ease of someone aware she draws a lascivious gaze and perfectly fine with that. Her simplicity is tantalizing to Logan, whom she teaches feminine techniques such as the “hair flip,” encouraging Logan to modify her severe brown-vested pantsuit (styled by costume designer Niloufar Ziaee) to something sexier.

While the characters are certainly satirical caricatures that sometimes test our emotional patience, they ring true enough to feel familiar and gain our sympathies via their earnestness and anxieties. It’s hard not to relate when Logan wails that she can’t shut off her constantly churning brain.

After all, at least they’re trying, and the solution is not to completely ignore glaring historical inequalities either. To underscore this message, interstitial videos by Tristan Gough, featuring Elley Ray Hennessey as a singing schoolteacher and some disturbing finger puppets from Eric Woolfe, treat us to what the blithe racism in the portrayal of Indigenous history and peoples has looked like past and present. The videos, supposedly inspired by real Pinterest-type suggested content found online, are a window into what the characters are trying to avoid, queasily marrying bright, kid-friendly colours and tones with upsetting content to normalize this kind of narrative.

FastHorse describes these scenes as the horror in the middle of the comedy, and in that vein, they almost don’t go too far enough, but their blithe presentation of stereotypes, slurs, and suicides still does plenty to elicit gasps from the audience. As well, there are times when the production’s pacing seems a little languid in comparison to the snappy lines; this is a satire, but it’s also a farce, and tightening the pace would further emphasize the eventual frenzy. The key to Strombergs’ production, however, is the pitch-perfect awkwardness of the characters as they flail about, more likely to stop their own progress dead for fear of making a mistake.

FastHorse’s play is reminiscent of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning Appropriate (given a searing production by Coal Mine last year); the plays, written by a Sicangu Lakota woman and Black man respectively, use only white characters in their discussions of racism and genocide, leading to questions about who gets to speak and who is most marketable on stage. In the absence of characters that share their experience on stage, the playwright’s voice is a constant presence.

It comes as no surprise that FastHorse’s sharp observations come from experience; one can only imagine that, as co-founder of Indigenous Direction, a “consulting firm that helps organizations and individuals who want to create accurate work by, for, and with Indigenous peoples,” she’s now seen it all at the corner between respect and erasure.

For our part, we can give thanks that her cutting, insightful work is here, and see it before it turkey trots away.

Photo credit: Dahlia Katz

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