‘The Thanksgiving Play’ serves a satirical feast that Broadway audiences can devour

The Rundown

Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play marks the first play by a female Indigenous playwright on Broadway (that we know of). In it, a well-meaning high school drama teacher, Logan (Katie Finneran), her wannabe actor boyfriend Jaxton (Scott Foley), and an over-enthusiastic history teacher/playwright, Caden (Chris Sullivan, This Is Us), come together with the help of several grants and at the behest of a school board, to put on a Thanksgiving play to honor Native American Heritage Month. Being all white but trying to be sensitive, they hire a professional Indigenous actor, Alicia (D’Arcy Carden, of The Good Place), but quickly learn that she’s actually white. Together, the group of four white people attempts to collectively devise a politically correct piece of theater about Indigenous people, but without any Indigenous people.

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No Tea, No Shade

The Thanksgiving Play is both a hilarious comedy and an effective satire, a crystal clear portrait of the excesses, hypocrisies, mental gymnastics, and sometimes emptiness of so-called wokeness, particularly within the (experimental) theater community. Over the course of 90 minutes, we watch the characters, particularly Logan and Jaxton, trip over themselves to sound the most sensitive, justify their creative decisions, and outdo one another as if competing for a trophy for most enlightened. The play is a searing read of those who are all about hollow gestures and talk of centering marginalized voices and “holding space” but who actually do not put any of this into practice. 

FastHorse wrote the play in 2015, which premiered Off-Broadway in 2018, and now is on Broadway. Over the years and with different directors (Rachel Chavkin helms this production), FastHorse has made various additions and let directors adjust; here, the updates to a post-Covid, post-George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter world are particularly effective and make the satire hit even harder. 

The scenes of the quartet of characters struggling over how to create a politically (and historically) correct Thanksgiving play with only white people are interspersed with video clips inspired by real-life content posted by teachers, including children dressed up in cringe-worthy redface, turkey outfits, and pilgrim costumes, singing deeply problematic songs which feature lyrics such as “on the fifth day of Thanksgiving, the Natives gave to me: Five pairs of moccasins, four bows and arrows, three Native headdresses, two turkey gobblers, and a pumpkin in a pumpkin patch.” These clips highlight the appalling state of education on Thanksgiving and Native history in this country and the need for an actual Thanksgiving play from an Indigenous perspective.

Let’s Have a Moment

D’Arcy Carden, on her way to becoming a queer icon, makes her Broadway debut and proves just how strong an actor she is. Her character is ditsy and “simple,” a spiritual successor of Karen from Mean Girls, but confident, assured, and comfortable with the role(s) that she plays — an actress happy to be an actress — and to take roles as various races and ethnicities because of her vaguely ambiguous features. Carden, well-known for her comedic delivery, shines in this role and brings a great deal of non-textual physical humor to the role via playful gestures, various quirky facial expressions and ad-libs, and some scene-stealing background acting.

The Last Word

While Straight White Men attempted to provide an anthropological look at its titular group and The Minutes sought to highlight the ways white people in America have purposefully hidden violent colonial histories against Indigenous populations, The Thanksgiving Play is much more successful at doing both. What’s more, it adds comedy to satirize what some consider “performative wokeness.” It is perhaps the best and most ironic twist that a play about four white people, supposedly desperate for an Indigenous voice/perspective, is written by an Indigenous playwright. The characters cannot figure out how to make a play about Indigenous people without any Indigenous people, but FastHorse manages just this while also masterfully dissecting the many issues of well-meaning but unhelpful white people. In this, she offers a masterclass in political theater that is equally critical and comedic.

The Thanksgiving Play appears on Broadway at the Hayes Theater through June 4.