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Reviewed by:
  • The Thanksgiving Playby Larissa FastHorse
  • Danielle Drees
The Thanksgiving Play. By Larissa FastHorse. Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Playwrights Horizons, Peter Jay Sharp Theater, New York City. 09 7, 2018.

Larissa FastHorse is the first Indigenous playwright to be produced by the off-Broadway theatre Playwrights Horizons. A writer, director, and choreographer from the Sicangu Lakota Nation, she has been writing for theatres across the United States [End Page 496]for the past decade. While many of her earlier plays dramatize interactions between Indigenous and non-Native characters, The Thanksgiving Playcalls for four white-passing actors, in response to directors' complaints that FastHorse's work was too difficult to stage because Native actors were too scarce to cast. At the center of the New York premiere of The Thanksgiving Play, then, was the question of how to represent Native Americans who were not present in whitewashed histories of Thanksgiving and in American theatre institutions. (Online and in a lobby installation, Playwrights Horizons drew attention to the history of Native American theatre elsewhere in New York, including Spiderwoman and the Native Shakespeare Ensemble.) Playwrights Horizons' staging of The Thanksgiving Playused the tools of devised theatre to lampoon the self-protective white performances of cultural sensitivity that displace and delay the work of producing Native American playwrights, casting Native American actors, and fully reckoning with the history of settler colonialism in the country.

The production depicted the first rehearsal of a devised forty-five-minute educational play. Four teaching artists gathered in a high school drama classroom. Logan, the director, expounded on the problematic history of redface performance while placing the labor of devising the play on the shoulders of her single Native cast member, Alicia, in the name of centering a Native voice. From the moment that Logan realized that Alicia was in fact a non-Native white actor with an ethnically ambiguous headshot, the production cycled through a farcical series of attempts to represent Native American people. The other two actors—Jaxton, a street performer and yoga devotee; and Caden, a third-grade teacher with playwriting aspirations—were equally ill-equipped to portray Native characters. Only Alicia herself, the sole paid actor in the group, was unconcerned with taking on a non-white role—after all, she was once the third understudy for Jasmine at Disney. Between episodes from this first rehearsal, the ensemble addressed the audience directly, performing Thanksgiving songs and skits taken from real teachers' Pinterest boards. These children's songs, which included lyrics about a Native dying by suicide, acted as a foil for the main story's comparatively thoughtful Thanksgiving play, setting a low bar for culturally sensitive theatre.

As they searched for a respectful way to represent Native Americans without casting them, Logan and her actors flung the tactics of experimental theatre at the problem of Indigenous absence, waiting to see what stuck. The white teaching artists' repeated desire to hold space for the Indigenous people not in the room with them translated the problems of teaching history into the language of socially conscious theatre-making. Logan and company tried everything from a dream sequence to ventriloquism, hoping that the more meta the performance was, the less offensive it would be. Moritz von Stuelpnagel's production caricatured their performance of wokeness and demonstrated how their self-indulgent white guilt hamstrung any real creative work. An improvised skit about the first Thanksgiving meal became a script reading in which the Natives' lines were left unspoken. In turn, this became a mimed performance in which everyonewas silent, which then became a sex farce, with Alicia proffering a turkey's "ample breast" and "moist legs" to an overexcited Caden. Each attempt at improving the play moved it further from the actors' earnestly avowed goal of centering Native Americans in the Thanksgiving story, as the performers amplified the physical comedy of the scene to solicit laughter and appreciation from the Playwrights audience.

The production also targeted US history education, using the teaching artists' hapless stabs at representing the Native experience to dismantle teacher Caden's dreams of an apolitical, authentic rendering of the first Thanksgiving. Caden, wielding an illustrated children's text, announced...

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