The Thanksgiving Play came into being, more or less, as a dare. When theater companies told Larissa FastHorse that her script featuring Indigenous characters What Would Crazy Horse Do? was virtually “uncastable”, she set out to write a show featuring zero actors from any minority group. In a somewhat dispiriting twist, the stunt worked. The Thanksgiving Play has become one of the most produced pieces of theater in the US.
The work centers on a quartet of theater nerds who meet in an elementary school classroom to craft a dramatic rendition of the Thanksgiving story that will possess adequate levels of accuracy and sensitivity. When it emerges that the professional actor who was hired to lend an Indigenous voice to the writers’ room is not, in fact, Native American, the classroom becomes a frantic workshop of wokeness, and the meta production plunges headlong into a state of absurdity that had viewers at a recent masked matinee howling into their N95s. FastHorse’s work is a scandalously entertaining turducken of identity politics and humor, taking aim at the buffoonery of the white-run theater world and the paralysis that can go hand in hand with over-analysis. Audiences will come for the jokes about virtue signaling and “vegan allyship” and leave with a queasy sense of confusion and self-loathing.
