A Thanksgiving Play to Outdo All that Have Come Before, at MCT
Torrey Hanson, Kelsey Brennan and Hannah Shay in “The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse. Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
In a 2018 interview about her much-produced work The Thanksgiving Play, Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse summarized the plot, saying “I make fun of white people for eighty-two minutes!” And in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s well executed production, available on video through May 23, that is exactly what you will get. Helmed by Laura Gordon, the four performers lean into intentional stereotypes of a shallow, ambitious actress expertly wielding her sex appeal; a frustrated academic and wannabe playwright; and two painfully lefty snowflakes crippled by their own hyper-awareness. At the crossroads of performative goodness, good intentions, liberal guilt, and pervasive self-interest, things go terribly wrong when the group is tasked with improvising an educational play about Thanksgiving.
In a “turnabout is fair play” sense, this is the least that the American theater world can do to make up for our collective past, rife with “injun” caricatures and stereotypes. From Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to crude characterizations in film and theater, Native Americans have been perennially painted as either red-skinned, noble savages; loyal sidekicks to white explorers and cowboys; or barbaric warriors who are about to rape and pillage their way through every white settler’s little house on the prairie.
Frankly it’s bad enough that after the Europeans landed in North America, they seized Indigenous people’s property, brought disease, issued a slew of dishonest treaties, and banished the tribes to barren reservations. We also erased their history and replaced it with cartoon characters, who are still trotted out at least once a year when we talk about the origins of American Thanksgiving.
Yes, according to written records from the 1620s, a group of Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans did share a feast and played some sports together, while giving thanks for the harvest. But that event bears little resemblance to our current festival of overeating, football-watching, and early Christmas shopping. And it is nothing like the simplistic origin stories filled with cardboard characters that we teach young people in school.
FastHorse sets her sights on this perpetuation of the “happy Indians and Pilgrims eating pumpkin pie” myth in The Thanksgiving Play, challenging four clueless white people to devise a 45-minute program for elementary schoolers with a myriad of lofty, and perhaps unattainable, goals. The pageant must be true, age appropriate and entertaining, culturally sensitive, politically correct, vegan friendly, acceptable to the principal, parents and school board, and satisfying to many arts grant funders as a celebration of Native American Heritage month. Yeah, good luck with that.
For drama teacher Logan (a delightfully neurotic Kelsey Brennan) there is a lot riding on this project. After hundreds of parents complained about her last production – The Iceman Cometh – she needs a crowd pleaser. And given her painfully “woke” world view, it must be as inclusive and sensitive as possible. That is why she hired a Native American actress all the way from L.A. to guide the project with the spiritual wisdom and authenticity of Pocahontas.
Except the actress Alicia (a pitch perfect Hannah Shay) is much more familiar with the Disney version of Native American history than the real thing. For starters, she’s not Native American, but given her generic ethnic “look,” her headshots lead casting directors to think that she can play one. (Her resume suggests she’s also perfect for Middle Eastern and Latina roles.) Pragmatic and ambitious, Alicia’s only concern is that she gets a lot of lines so she can advance her career.
Eric Schabla and Hannah Shay in “The Thanksgiving Play.” Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
Physically, Shay oozes sensuality, even when she is miming a butter-churning pilgrim. She is particularly entertaining as she explains her artistic process, her strategy for getting people to leave her alone, and her straightforward “simplicity.” A perfect example of the ditsy, gorgeous attention sponge, she often seems like the smartest person in the room.
By contrast, Brennan is an exposed nerve who illustrates Logan’s struggle keep her act together, both physically and emotionally. Depending on overly fraught and ineffective rituals of decoupling, meditation, and visualization, the zen she wants to project gets further away every minute.
Torrey Hanson’s nerdy, middle-aged history teacher Caden has seized the Thanksgiving play as his big break – he can not only show off his extensive scholarship, but also fulfill his creative goal of being a playwright, with actual professional actors reading his painstakingly crafted lines. But when Logan throws out much of his research and opts to devise a play rather than work from a written script, his crest falls with a thud. Fortunately Caden is distracted from his personal woes by Alicia’s low cut shirt, skin-tight jeans and mesmerizing hair flips. Hanson’s arc from grateful participant in a dream project to bitter player in a literal farce feels painfully genuine, and his final rebellion is even funnier since it’s filled with righteous and dramatic indignation.
Eric Schabla and Kelsey Brennan in “The Thanksgiving Play.” Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
Eric Schabla is the other half of the woke snowflake duo – Logan’s partner Jaxton, who is passionate about staying true to his inner callings; performing PSA-filled street theater at farmer’s markets and doing yoga while being conscious of his massive privilege as a straight white man. With all the bald pretension of a character from “Portlandia,” Schabla’s earnestness is impressive. Subverting virtually every natural impulse and replacing them with apologetic, uber-PC jargon, he has an alternative explanation for everything – even eating cheese in front of his adamantly vegan partner. His serious tone makes Jaxton’s lines all the more ridiculous.
In between the scenes where the well-intentioned troupe brainstorms about their original play, they perform truly cringe-worthy songs, clumsily written, offensively costumed and thoroughly dumbed down for Thanksgiving pageants that might be performed in grade school gyms. The truly shocking thing about these hideous musical interludes is that they weren’t written by FastHorse – they were taken directly from resources for teachers found online by the playwright. I wish that fact had been more prominent in the play, rather than something I found out about later in doing my own reading. Juxtaposing the actual and the satirical is as embarrassing as it is jarring.
Expertly performed and fluidly directed, The Thanksgiving Play is a good lesson in listening, a comeuppance for tone deaf do-gooders, and a field day for Fox News fans, who get to watch their favorite liberal elite targets get skewered by the very special interest that they are trying to protect and uplift. It’s also a one-joke play that goes over the same ground for an hour-and-a-half. Reading through the program notes after the performance, I was relieved that this production did not make the same mistake as its fictional counterpart: MCT did actually engage Benjamin Wilson, a Native American dramaturg, to help the cast sort out the thorny issues raised in the script. I found myself longing to hear what he had to say. But the fact that his commentary wasn’t onstage just underlines the point of the play.