Review: In ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Who Gets Roasted?

Review: In ‘The Thanksgiving Play,’ Who Gets Roasted?

“Is Lumière a real candlestick?” she asks.

While processing that — and trying to deal with the effect the bubble-headed Alicia has on the men — Logan has to figure out whether it’s possible to create a Thanksgiving pageant sensitive to Native American concerns with no Native Americans in the room. After a series of tortured mental exercises, including improv sessions in a “world of yes,” she ends up reaching the illogical logical conclusion that the only way to honor the erasure of indigenous peoples is by erasing them again.

That isn’t as much of an exaggeration as it seems. The renowned Quebec theater director Robert Lepage was recently criticized for “Kanata,” a work about Indigenous Canadians that somehow neglected to include any. And Ms. FastHorse says that the main obstacle she faces in having her plays about Native Americans produced is that companies find them “uncastable.”

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a clever workaround, written to be performed by an all-white cast and thus to make hay of an absence that would otherwise be a liability. Or perhaps what it means to make is mincemeat: The ridiculous agonizing of the four “teaching artists” produces brutal laughs at the expense of well-meaning liberals who conceal ordinary prejudice under the mask of “performative wokeness.” They want to help but in their fear of offending are the least helpful of all.

That this aspect of the satire works as well as it does is a credit to the swift pacing of Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production and the acuity of his casting. Mr. Keller, whose résumé is filled with slackers, bros and skeeves, concocts in Jaxton an artisanal blend of all three: sincere insincerity served in a Mason jar. Ms. Bareilles and Mr. Bean are both expert in letting their characters’ inner turmoil — exactly what they most hide — leak out.

But oddly it is Ms. Seibert as the dim Alicia, content to be pretty and confident in her shallow ambition, who delivers the deepest characterization. She may not really understand why a Native American is different from a candlestick, but she’s ready to act any scene put before her, especially if she gets to cry.

The problem for “The Thanksgiving Play” is that, in splitting its satirical attention, it shortchanges the nominal subject. Though the one-note wrangling of the teaching artists is amusing, the absence of characters who could meaningfully oppose their dead-end liberal agenda leaves a hole at the heart of the story. I sometimes had the sour feeling I get when watching hidden-camera videos of people behaving badly; a little goes a long way. Here, a lot goes too far.

That was Ms. FastHorse’s dramaturgical trade-off. And, by the way, there’s a lot of inside-theater comedy here, including jokes about dramaturges that may sail past civilians. It’s only when the play, in a series of skits between scenes, takes off its gloves and aims squarely at its real subject — racism — that the comedy becomes something more salient, if unfunny.

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