Review: ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ is an unforgiving Broadway satire of turkey day

NEW YORK — The premise of “The Thanksgiving Play,” a gutsy, newish play by the talented Larissa FastHorse, is that Americans’ annual November feast, with all of its attendant pageants and pro-Pilgrim culture, is in essence a celebration of a genocide. And, therefore, whatever attempts are made to fiddle with the edges of the experience, to make things less offensive or more politically correct is simply — to paraphrase the Gospel according to Matthew — to take the speck out of the turkey juice but miss the giant plank in the gravy bowl.

Laughing yet?

“The Thanksgiving Play,” which opened last week on Broadway at Second Stage with Katie Finneran, Scott Foley, D’Arcy Carden and Chris Sullivan, is actually a funny and cutting piece of work. It suffers from its own moral earnestness, although kindly note I’m speaking there of its structure, not the case it makes about Thanksgiving.

The play both wants to send up Broadway luvvies and lefties and such progressive jargon as ‘mutually supportive relationship,” “holding space for you” and even loudly spoken but conventional pronoun declarations, but it is also committed to redemptive justice. It’s just hard to pull off both at once in 90 minutes of stage time, especially since satire works best when it takes down people who clearly have oppressive power, which is not so much the case here.

At the end of the day, though, FastHorse is clearly saying that non-Native Americans should shut up about the morally bankrupt historical derivation of Thanksgiving and just watch football instead. She makes a very good case that the holiday is an outrage.

What you’re watching here (under the direction of Rachel Chavkin) is an elementary school teacher (played by Finneran) who has been given a nice grant to produce an original Thanksgiving play that is more appropriate (or so she thinks) than the traditional Pilgrim promoting pulp. She has brought in her boyfriend (Foley), a colleague with writing ambitions (played by Sullivan) and, drum roll please, a professional actress (Carden) whom she thought was Native American.

Alas for her, and for the veracity of the project, Carden’s character is white, albeit perhaps with “a bit of Spanish.” She has several reels, all suggesting different ethnicities, just to increase her chances at getting hired. They recover from that disappointment. But their subsequent efforts to really depict the violence suffered by Native Americans in Thanksgiving’s name ends up being as offensive as it is pathetic.

In between, you get little, “Funny or Die”-style video segments of cute kids parroting the kinds of Thanksgiving pageants that used to be featured at elementary schools across the land. These pieces are supposed to be droll, of course, but they don’t really pop.

“Thanksgiving Play” has been well-received in other productions both in New York and regionally and thus I suspect it has had much funnier, and deeper ranging, interpretations that this one, which is just not really staged with an eye to comedy.

The production problems evident here are rooted in a lack of believability: FastHorse’s premise only works if you can imagine this little crew really existing and the actors and director have to make that happen. Alas, they don’t.

To cite just one example, there’s the issue of characters overhearing others. Throughout the piece, private conversations would clearly be audible to people who cannot hear them for the plot to function. Elsewhere, gags don’t really build or climax in classic farcical fashion and, more problematic yet, the actors don’t really have much of an emotional connection with each other, which actually is crucial to this genre, too. FastHorse has written in some potentially uproarious sexual gags too, and yet none of those seem to work.

Certainly, there are some funny moments, most of which flow from Carden, the only performer here who really has found a consistent, confident style. Everyone else spends a lot of the play trying to find some kind of mutually effective root. I suspect they all were unsure about how real to be and how far to go, given the premise, but then satire is all about risks and dangers.

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