By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
What’s a well-meaning school theater teacher to do to mark Thanksgiving in a culturally appropriate way, especially when the “indigenous” actress hired for the show, turns out to be not indigenous, but ethnically Disney?
Spoiler alert: the solution does not include severed heads of Pequod people.
“The Thanksgiving Play” by Sicangu Lakota playwright Larissa FastHorse serves up the American holiday heavily seasoned with satirical wit as a quartet of White stereotypes claw their way through centuries of stereotypes about indigenous people.
The Actors Collaborative Toledo brings “The Thanksgiving Play,” directed by Joe Capucini, to the Maumee Indoor Theater’s studio space this weekend three shows , tonight (11-10-23) and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets can be purchased in advance at www.act419.org or at the door.
(A portion of the proceeds will benefit Equality Toledo’s Community Food Pantry. ACT will also be accepting donations of non-perishable food items, personal hygiene products, and pet food during the run of the show to be donated to Equality Toledo’s Community Food Pantry.)
The Thanksgiving story and its place in the history of the country’s oppression of its native population seems like a topic diners may want to avoid while noshing on turkey and cranberries. It’s fraught with problematic mythology and uncomfortable history – the kind of content some want to ban from US school curricula.
But Logan (Kate Abu-Absi) is not one of those. She wants to confront those issues directly – albeit within the confines of a 45-minute theater piece for elementary school students.
Logan brings an avant-garde sensibility to the project. She also brings her own, very real fears, that if she doesn’t pull this off, she’ll lose her job. She’s also a vegan, so the whole slaughter of the innocent gobblers is distasteful to the point of disgust for her.
She recruits her boyfriend Jaxton (Tim McMahon), a street performer who does skits about composting at the farmers market and deems himself a professional actor, as part of the three-person cast.
Before they start though, they make a ritual “uncoupling” gesture to separate their professional interactions from their personal interactions.
Jaxton, for his part, is “a vegan ally.”
Also, joining them is an elementary teacher, history geek, and aspiring playwright Caden (Jim Pinkelman). Though the play will be devised by the cast working collaboratively, he comes in with an armload of material, including a script.
This whole devised thing also misses Alicia (Angiovanna Gresko), a young, comely actress recently moved to town from Hollywood. She just wants lines to recite and a check to cash.
That check was made possible by a grant to support productions for Native American heritage Month. Logan hired Alicia thinking she was indigenous. No, she’s English, French, with a little Spanish. She has an ethnically ambiguous look as shown in various headshots, including one with Native American trappings. Alicia can play any number of Disney princesses.
That she’s not indigenous becomes clear to the audience from the first, but Jaxton in particular constantly defers to her as an indigenous person. Alicia, however, doesn’t catch his confusion. When she tells them she spends Thanksgiving watching sports, he assumes lacrosse. No, she says, the Chiefs.
They have a team just for chiefs, Jaxton responds.
What games does her family play, Logan wonders.
Then Alicia describes a bowling-like game involving a frozen turkey. They’re called Butterballs, Alicia notes, but they’re not shaped like balls. And, in Hollywood heat, they tend to start to thaw pretty quickly.
Together the quartet struggles to come up with an appropriate script, working their way through a hilarious tangle of political correctness and sensitivity, and much talk about recognizing privilege, and how they can represent the indigenous view without actual indigenous participants.
Logan, Jaxton, and Caden overthink everything. Thinking, though, is not in Alicia’s toolbox.
Interspersed are scenes of elementary school attempts to address the holiday including opening the play with a parody of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” that substitutes partridges, turtle doves and the like with items the indigenous people gave the Pilgrims starting with a pumpkin in the pumpkin patch and followed by a litany of stereotypical Native items – teepees, drums, head dresses and the like.
Another skit includes a story about little turkeys looking forward to Thanksgiving that turns increasingly grim.
At once naïve, and yet cynical, Alicia is the kind of character who may lead the others to revelations about themselves. But for that they would actually have to be as self-aware as they think they are. But that’s the essential element that makes them such entertaining hosts for this holiday send up.
