Theater Review: ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Dorset Theatre Festival

In Larissa FastHorse’s glorious satire, the play within the play keeps sticking out a turkey leg, collapsing under the cultural weight of a story that is now impossible to tell and then gobbling for our attention again. The Thanksgiving Play features four earnest, vain and tragically self-absorbed white people straining to create an elementary school pageant about the first Thanksgiving that includes, but never appropriates, a Native American perspective.

It’s not as simple as corn versus maize to these performative culture warriors. They struggle with everything, especially each other. The Dorset Theatre Festival‘s production is a laugh machine, thanks to a very fine cast willing to bury themselves in their characters. Director Raz Golden lets the script’s broad humor explode in physical mayhem but also brings out the overwrought struggles with language that tie these sincere people up in knots.

The first laugh in a show like this is the trickiest, because the play is all about giving ourselves permission to see what’s funny in our brave new world of cultural sensitivity. FastHorse includes four scenes based on real-life Thanksgiving plays proudly posted online by actual teachers. In the first of these, pilgrims sing about “what the Indians gave to me” to the tune of “The 12 Days of Christmas.” Somewhere in America, kids have seen a skit telling them that “Native Americans learned about sharing” as the settlers went about taking their land.

The Thanksgiving story has been twisted for centuries, but our four characters are determined to do better. And that takes intensive self-scrutiny, as they catch themselves each time their good intentions meet ingrained insensitivity. Yet somehow they descend into comic savagery at any opportunity.

Logan (Kate MacCluggage, wonderful) is a high school drama teacher determined to build the kids’ pageant out of nonhierarchical group improv while ensuring its legitimacy by hiring a professional actor who is Native American. Virtuous to a fault, Logan is doing battle on many fronts. As a vegan, she considers Thanksgiving a trauma in itself. After a spectacularly bad choice for the high school’s play (15-year-olds as alcoholics in The Iceman Cometh?), she can’t afford another misstep. And now she’s grappling with presenting history while adhering to the terms of a grant for “Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art.”

Lending support — and pouring on the wellness terminology and healing gestures to prove it — is Logan’s boyfriend, Jaxton (Stephen Stocking, hilarious). Aimless beyond a tendency to strike random yoga poses, Jaxton is an unemployed actor who burnishes his liberal sheen by frequently acknowledging his heteronormative privilege — an apology that always sounds like boasting.

Caden (Craig Wesley Divino, delightfully earnest) is a history teacher who has taken up Logan’s request for help with historical accuracy by collecting a numbing amount of material, then attempting his own playwriting debut. He’s also eager to act and quick to ditch his source material for prop muskets and hatchets.

Arriving late, with a spangled coffee go-cup and a cellphone she won’t put down, is Alicia (Isabel Pask, serenely straight-faced). She’s the Los Angeles actor Logan has scraped up the funding to cast, and everyone clears space, literally and figuratively, for her to grace the production with Native wisdom. She’s also pretty hot.

Jaxton sprawls at Alicia’s feet to appreciate her chakras up close, while Caden yearns from afar. Logan expects Alicia to be her guiding star. Trouble is, Alicia isn’t Native American. She just plays the different ethnicities her head shots were designed to suggest. Logan’s dream of a sensitive depiction of colonialism faces yet another obstacle.

The humor leaps from zany bits reminiscent of the Marx Brothers to intricate wit, always fueled by characters who can’t perceive their flaws. With helter-skelter energy, the production layers the collective efforts to develop a play together with a meta level of commentary. The characters are truly lovable, despite their empty self-importance and strict conformity to standard gender roles. Running a sleek 90 minutes without intermission, The Thanksgiving Play is exhilarating and kept last Friday’s preview audience laughing nonstop.

Viewers never lose sight of the play-within-the-play structure because scenic designer Sasha Schwartz spans the stage with meticulously painted curtains that slide open to reveal … another set of slightly smaller meticulously painted curtains. The footlights repeat as well, shrinking as the curtains do and inviting us deep into a theatrical dollhouse nestled within a well-realized grade school classroom.

Lighting designer Krista Smith uncorks a wide range of moods, from the soporific fluorescents of a schoolroom to screwball effects expressing the characters’ wild flights of imagination. Costume designer April Hickman has a fine eye for current versions of expressing cool, or the lack of it, in the deep vocabulary of clothing.

The script supplies only rough descriptions of the bad educational Thanksgiving pieces, so Golden and projections designer Joey Moro are free to run riot. On film, Stocking plays both Natives and white men performing a medley of tunes anchored by “This Land Is Your Land.” For maximum cringe, Moro dissolves all of Stocking’s personae into one merged, narcissistic face. In another skit, an “outcry” on behalf of the Indigenous, the cast stands in black while projections pour over them as they give sanctimonious voice to nothing more than their own indignation.

This stuff is hilarious, but a more important cultural sign may be that it took a playwright of the Sicangu Lakota Nation to locate it and entertain us with it. The play’s central joke is that sensitivity requires impossible contortions that eventually warp into a brand-new reason for erasing Native Americans from history.

FastHorse’s script is packed with inside jokes about theater, with good reason: Identity is performance. When Logan, feeling deceived that she’s cast a white woman, tells Alicia, “I hired you to be the Native American,” Alicia replies, “You hired me to be an actress.” And off the comedy flies, everyone playing a part.

This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2023.

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