Curio Theatre Company presents Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play

FastHorse’s satire, which originally premiered in 2018, hits some easy targets at first but escalates in hilarity and insight as the characters’ attempt to workshop their school play falls apart. Director Tim Martin’s cheerfully politically incorrect video interludes and strong performances from Felicia Leicht and Nathan Joseph help make this production impossible to miss for locals also wrestling with the meaning of the upcoming holiday.

Chasing cultural sensitivity

A Sicangu Lakota woman, FastHorse originally wrote The Thanksgiving Play after someone told her another script featuring Indigenous characters was “uncastable.” Thus, the characters here—elementary school theater director Logan (Rachel Gluck), actor and would-be yogi Jaxton (Joseph), Hollywood actor Alicia (Leicht), and history teacher Caden (Paul Harrold)—are all white. Logan and Jaxton, especially, are painfully aware of their whiteness and are determined to produce an authentic, culturally sensitive First Thanksgiving play for the school. Besides, Logan got grants for putting this on during Native American Heritage Month, and she’s also hoping this will win back some angry parents who want her fired.

Logan hires Alicia to provide “perspective,” thinking she’s Indigenous, only to learn the clueless actor is white and just does “redface” for the camera. When he isn’t falling for Alicia, Caden has his own wild ideas for the production involving cannons and (maybe) some severed heads. The four idiosyncratic characters must figure out how to put on a politically correct play about Thanksgiving with no Native American voices in the room, even as they reveal their own prejudices and lack of understanding.

Balancing condemnation and empathy

The Thanksgiving Play reminded me of later seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where the jokes come from the clueless white characters trying to do the right thing regarding race. One distinction is that FastHorse’s script nimbly balances between condemnation and empathy. The characters mostly feel like real people even when they’re outright ridiculous (though the bit early on about Logan and Jaxton’s relationship and their “decoupling” yoga-style routine is too obvious). Jaxton’s fawning (and very funny) worship of Alicia, when he thinks she’s Indigenous, will be all too familiar to anyone in liberal social circles, just like Caden’s instinctive defense of Christopher Columbus. The show nails the knee-jerk neuroses and condemnation of well-intentioned white people who want to be good but don’t really know how.

FastHorse’s dynamic itself cleverly mocks the history of Native American representation in pop culture and media as, once again, white creatives portray people they don’t understand. The same goes for Alicia’s cheerful portrayal of other races, with Leicht hilariously nailing Alicia’s “simplicity” as well as the inner confidence that makes her a good actor. The awful, blackly funny video interludes presented on a background screen make a clever contrast to the “woke” main characters: these racist and inaccurate portrayals of the First Thanksgiving (for kids!) demonstrate what the four are up against and what they’re unintentionally echoing.

A rare satire

This production isn’t a masterpiece. The yogi jokes are obvious, and some of the blocking here is awkward. A few visual gags certainly would have hit harder if the characters were standing just a few inches further apart, like Caden’s accidental dirty drawing on the whiteboard. Regardless, at about 90 minutes, The Thanksgiving Play never wears out its welcome and is a laugh-out-loud play, the rare satire that only gets better as the jokes increase in anger and sheer velocity.

By the curtain call, the play has earned its final, downright nihilistic punchline, a perfect “solution” to an intractable problem. What can white people do to depict the experiences of Native Americans? FastHorse’s ending suggests the answer has been right there the whole time, and I hope theatergoing audiences will find it as funny as I did.