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.
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?
If history is written by the victors, it’s being rewritten — still by the victors — in The Thanksgiving Play. In Larissa FastHorse’s satire, a group of liberal-minded white people gathers to devise a play about Thanksgiving that will honor a Native American perspective on the atrocities Pilgrims committed without any insight into an actual Native American perspective. Their project, as you’d expect, goes wrong quickly. The problem is that The Thanksgiving Play intentionally hurtles its characters toward a dead end — like Wile E. Coyote toward a tunnel entrance that’s just drawn on the side of a rock — and it gets stuck once they crash. It takes them down but never justifies why we’re here with them in the first place.
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.
2018 | Off-Broadway |
Playwrights Horizons World Premiere Off-Broadway |
2023 | Broadway |
Second Stage Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2023 | Drama League Awards | Distinguished Performance Award | D'Arcy Carden |
2023 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Revival of a Play | The Thanksgiving Play |
2023 | Theatre World Awards | Theatre World Awards | D'Arcy Carden |
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