Craig Lauzon, Colin A. Doyle, Rachel Cairns and Jada Rifkin in The Thanksgiving Play.Dahlia Katz/Mirvish
- Title: The Thanksgiving Play
- Written by: Larissa FastHorse
- Director: Vinetta Strombergs
- Actors: Rachel Cairns, Colin A. Doyle, Craig Lauzon, Jada Rifkin
- Company: Pop-Up Theatre Canada presented by Mirvish Productions
- Venue: CAA Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: Runs to Oct. 20, 2024
Wrong place and time? Misguided direction?
It’s hard to say exactly why The Thanksgiving Play comes across as a turkey in its Canadian premiere, a Pop-Up Theatre Canada production at the CAA Theatre that’s part of the off-Mirvish season.
Playwright Larissa FastHorse made American history in 2023 with this satire when it became the first play by a known female Native American playwright produced on Broadway.
It’s been celebrated and sparked many conversations south of the border – and it certainly has a strong starting point.
In an American town that we only know is not Los Angeles, educational theatre-maker Logan (Rachel Cairns) has been hired to devise a show for children to be presented around American Thanksgiving as part of Native American Heritage Month.
She’s assembled a cast of three: Two unpaid amateurs – her street-performer boyfriend, Jaxton (Colin A. Doyle), and a history teacher and wannabe playwright, Caden (Craig Lauzon) – and a professional actress named Alicia (Jada Rifkin) whom Logan believes is Native American.
It doesn’t take long, however, for everyone to realize that Alicia, who has been hired through a Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant, is not, in fact, Indigenous; she has different headshots she sends out for different “ethnic” roles and is, in fact, of French, English and maybe a little Spanish descent.
The conundrum: How are these four white people going to create a play getting to the truth behind the whitewashing Thanksgiving myths about Pilgrims and peaceful feasting without falling into redface? The answer is by tangling themselves up in knots of pseudo-woke language.
JAXTON: I don’t think we’re supposed to speak for anyone but ourselves.
LOGAN: Right. So we just speak for white people?
JAXTON: I think so. We see colour but we don’t speak for it.
This is one of the less broadly satirical passages from FastHorse’s script – which begins with yoga slacker Jaxton gifting Logan a water bottle made out of “recycled glass from broken windows in housing projects.” Not for her the loving lampooning of progressives (or sly punchlines) you currently find in TV series such as English Teacher or Hacks.
Colin A. Doyle and Craig Lauzon in The Thanksgiving Play.Dahlia Katz/Mirvish
Director Vinetta Strombergs has her actors lean into caricature in their portrayals – and takes that broad style even broader in videos that are projected above the set between scenes.
Inspired by actual American Thanksgiving lesson plans that FastHorse found online, these clips are full of offensive stereotypes and imagery related to Indigenous people – from a Nine Days of Thanksgiving rhyme where on each day “the Natives” give another absurd gift to “me”; to excerpts of the racist children’s counting song that ends with “And then there were none” acted out with violent puppetry.
I suspect the point of these interstitial scenes is to ground the making of the meta-play in the reality of casual anti-Indigenous racism in America, but, shot as over-the-top sketch comedy, they seem like shock South Park-style comedy that doesn’t land.
Over all, The Thanksgiving Play, in Strombergs’s production in Toronto, comes across as a show about how backward and behind-the-time Americans are, rather than anything that implicates the local audience.
It’s impossible to feel anything but disconnected watching white artists in an explicitly “post-BLM” context navigate this particular situation without using the expression cultural appropriation or mentioning the “pretendian” phenomenon – and only employing the word settler as a historical term.
The request “nothing about us without us,” articulated by, among others, Kevin Loring at the Indigenous Theatre at the National Arts Centre during the controversy over Robert Lepage’s Kanata in 2018, enjoys broad recognition on this side of the border – and came into focus with the cancellation of Michelle Latimer’s television series Trickster in 2021.
I can see how FastHorse’s play and its conclusion might resonate more in a society that hadn’t gone though those national discussions – but, landing in Toronto the week of Truth and Reconciliation Day, The Thanksgiving Play feels like an opportunity for Canadians to pat themselves on the back rather than confront our own dangerous myths.
For a cross-border contrast, it’s worth heading over to Canadian Stage to compare with 1939, Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan’s excellent play imagining a performance of a Shakespeare play in a residential school. It’s set in the past but speaks better to our here and now.