Broadway Play Review—“The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse

The Thanksgiving Play

Written by Larissa FastHorse; directed by Rachel Chavkin

Performances through June 11, 2023

Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY

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D’Arcy Carden, Chris Sullivan, Katie Finneran and Scott Foley
in The Thanksgiving Play (photo: Joan Marcus)

Larissa FastHorse’s fast-paced farce The Thanksgiving Play finds comedy in a fairly easy target: white theater people trying to assuage their liberal guilt. Set in a grammar school classroom in Anytown, USA, the play centers on Logan, a teacher whose ill-advised student productions have gotten 300 parents to sign a petition to remove her, and her actor boyfriend Jaxton, veteran of local farmer’s market performances, who helps by making sure he calls out whenever their white privilege rears its head.

Logan is planning a Thanksgiving play that won’t offend anyone, she hopes, knowing the parents’ sword of Damocles is perching above her head. So she’s hired who she thinks is a Native actress, Alicia (pronounced Ah-lee-cee-a), with help from a Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant. But when Alicia arrives, it turns out she’s just another white actress from L.A. (She had her dark hair in braids and wore a turquoise necklace in her headshot, which fooled Logan.) Rounding out the quartet is Caden, elementary-school history teacher and closet playwright who’s written scenarios he’s itching to have acted out.

It’s not hard to see where this is heading. As Logan tries to create an illuminating piece of theater for children that has no Native participation, she and the others are desperate to be “fair,” as they see it, which just points up their obvious cluelessness. Alicia seems less foolish because she doesn’t put on any airs. Her “simplicity,” as Logan labels it, bemuses the other three. 

FastHorse (who is the first Native American woman playwright to have a play produced on Broadway) gets some mileage out of familiar comic situations but eventually runs out of ideas and goes for “shock” with a tasteless scene of pilgrims kicking around Native heads like soccer balls (similar to the “turkey bowling” from Alicia’s childhood she describes earlier) as fake blood sprays profusely. Still, she displays a happy talent for biting dialogue (as well as naming three characters with the pretentiously white names Logan, Jaxton and Caden). 

For example, Logan and Jaxton get into a tiff about her as the play’s director: 

LOGAN: Jaxton, I made it clear from the beginning that in this format I will have final say. 

JAXTON: Yeah but— 

LOGAN: I said no!

JAXTON: You’re being a bitch—bit dictatorial about it.

LOGAN: That is an incredibly offensive gender biased statement. 

JAXTON: I went by the pronoun “they” for a full year. I’m allowed one mistake.

LOGAN: That wasn’t a mistake. You’ve always been jealous of me because I’m a theater professional and you aren’t.

And Logan belatedly realizes that Alicia isn’t a real Native actress: 

LOGAN: But we need a Native American person to do this play. I got a grant.

ALICIA: Look, you hired me off my Native American headshot, so that’s on you. You can’t fire me because of this. It’s a law. 

LOGAN: So we’re four white people making a culturally sensitive First Thanksgiving play for Native American Heritage Month?  

ALICIA: Whatever, it’s theater. We don’t need actual Native Americans to tell a Native American story. I mean, none of us are actual Pilgrims, are we?

Director Rachel Chavkin’s swift, slick staging—on Riccardo Hernandez’s accurately cluttered classroom set—adds comic sheen to such exchanges and to the filmed bits of children singing eyebrow-raising tunes like the opening “12 Days of Thanksgiving” (while dressed as pilgrims and Indians) or singing an ironic punk version of “Home on the Range.” 

In an otherwise fine cast of four, Katie Finneran, as Logan, overdoes the satire by dialing her performance up to 11 early on and staying there. Scott Foley (Jaxton) and Chris Sullivan (Caden) are more controlled—and funnier—in their characters’ seemingly willful obliviousness. Best of all is D’Arcy Caden, who shrewdly underplays Alicia, stealing moments left and right with a raised eyebrow, pregnant pause, effortless hair flip (to impress upon Logan how to catch Jaxton’s eye) or a perfectly placed line reading. When she says “simplicity,” almost to herself as a mantra after impressing the others with her guilelessness, The Thanksgiving Play hints at the giddy heights of absurdity it only intermittently reaches.