A satire of wacky wokeness, Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” cleverly depicts the efforts of a few well-meaning but self-interested white people to “devise” a politically correct Turkey Day pageant for an elementary school audience that lifts up, gives voice to, or makes space for the Native American point of view.
They struggle, to say the least.
In a fast-paced, insightfully amusing 90 minutes, FastHorse skewers theater and theater artists, grantmakers, school mascots, politically correct lingo, the failure to represent Indigenous people, badly stereotyping Indigenous people, sugar-coating history and, worse, depicting the bloody reality as a form of entertainment. That’s not to mention veganism, intelligence tests, human vanity, recycling and even minimalism.
The play, receiving its Chicago premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre, was first produced in 2018, became one of the most staged works in the country, made it to Broadway last year, and is generally recognized as the first such production from a female Native American playwright.
There’s a complex aspect even to those facts, as FastHorse suggested her own experience with rejection, based on the excuse that theaters simply didn’t have Native Americans actors available to play parts she had written, led her to write a play without any in them. Lo and behold, a hit. Go ahead: Sit in that uncomfortable reality for a moment. Take your time.
Directed by Jess McLeod and with a typically — meaning exceptionally — able Steppenwolf cast, “The Thanksgiving Play” feels like a mix between the excellent sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” the recent cringeworthy Showtime series “The Curse,” and in theme, the work of Suzan-Lori Parks, playwright extraordinaire when it comes to the very notion of history as a type of performance.
The entire play portrays the first day of rehearsal for the Thanksgiving pageant project. Coming off her calamitous choice to direct “The Iceman Cometh” with highschoolers, pretentious and insecure drama teacher Logan (a deeply committed Audrey Francis) hopes to redeem herself by creating a new Thanksgiving work to be performed at the local elementary school. She has managed to score some funding from a “Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant” and has used it to hire a professional Native American actor. She thinks.
Alas, it turns out the Los Angeles performer she selected, Alicia (Paloma Nozicka), simply has a headshot that made her seem Native American. It’s one of many headshots Alicia uses to emphasize her “flexible” look.
Jaxton (Nate Santana), a local street performer at the farmer’s market, immediately insists he, too, is flexible, but he may be referring to his yoga credentials, or to the fact that for a full year he used “they/them” pronouns, a history he raises to defend himself after releasing a misogynistic insult to Logan, who also happens to be his girlfriend.
Our fourth troupe member Caden (Tim Hopper), a history teacher and aspiring playwright, shows up with thousands of years’ worth of documentation and some pre-written dialogue he’s hoping to employ in their planned 45-minute performance for kids. Unfortunately, every fact that might make the play historically accurate gets instantly nixed. After all, Logan understandably recoils from having the pilgrims relentlessly refer to Native Americans as “savages,” no matter how much authenticity that would provide.
McLeod, who has worked as resident Chicago director for “Hamilton” — a show that also had something to say about “who lives, who dies, who tells your story” — certainly understands how ridiculous these characters are, although the production might provide a more effective crescendo if she restrained their absurdity early on. There is something safe, distant, overly comfortable in how this show comes across, as much of the acting — sharply timed and funny as it is — carries with it a sense of commentary from the get-go.
Nozicka, a Steppenwolf newbie, provides the exception to this, delivering a delicious turn as a character completely unconflicted by her self-interest, and thus somehow the wisest, although certainly not the smartest — “I’ve been tested,” she says — of the bunch.
Satire tends to be very much of-the-moment, and one can feel that this play may already be losing some of its comic zestiness as extreme performative wokeness becomes a familiar object of ridicule. Fortunately, there’s an intention here to show the opposite — the un-considered, the un-woke — in the opening and between-scenes depictions of based-on-real-life school performances. At the most innocent, there’s the suggestion that a kid saying “Injun” rather than Indian would be cuter.
As this single rehearsal day spins out of control, one thing that must be said about FastHorse is that she’s certainly willing to “go there,” meaning to the darkest of dark possibilities. After all, what does it really look like to depict the horrors of history to people who think of Thanksgiving as a day about football?
