Stage Review - The Thanksgiving Play (Woodinville Repertory Theatre)
Stage Review - The Thanksgiving Play
Presented By: Woodinville Repertory Theatre - Woodinville, WA
Show Run: October 18 - November 17, 2024
Date Reviewed: Friday, November 16, 2024
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman
I’m going to start out by saying I absolutely love The Thanksgiving Play, the 2018 play by Larissa FastHorse that interrogates the idea of “wokeism” and dissects the common American idea of Thanksgiving, the history and folklore around it, the way it has been presented in our classrooms and in our living rooms, and how it’s become controversial in its subversion of native voices as a white-centric holiday. The comedy harkens back to the kind of humor the great Norman Lear is known for, deploying common stereotypes as a vehicle for pointing out hypocrisies and the shortsightedness of the characters and the subject matter therein. In fact, the usage of the stereotypes is crucial to making The Thanksgiving Play work. The artistic staff at Woodinville Repertory Theatre must agree with me, and also that this is the perfect time of year to put up the Thanksgiving Play, as they have just concluded a one-month run of the piece at the Restaurant at DeLille Cellars this past Saturday in a production directed by Jenny Cross.
The Thanksgiving Play is part of what Woodinville Rep hopes is a long term relationship with DeLille and this installment of the budding partnership created a wonderful experience for this show. One of the beautiful things about this piece is that it’s relatively simple to produce, in that there aren’t a lot of requirements that need to be followed by a director. It doesn’t demand much of a set, just a classroom location, and a company can use as many props as they feel necessary to tell the story, aside from a few key items, and the cast consists of four individuals. In a room upstairs in the Restaurant at DeLille, Molly West’s classroom set was a simple strip of stage space in front of a series of rows of tables, at which patrons could order food and drinks prior to the presentation of the play. There was also general seating on a riser toward the back of the room, but this setup provided a nice ambience especially for this particular show. Lightning designer Leroy Timblin clearly spent a decent amount of time in classrooms as when the house lights lowered, he nailed the florescence of the school set. The small, but functional classroom area had a nice feel to it, a teacher’s desk and chalkboard to stage left, and with various posters and other educational items hung on the wall, it definitely felt like a schoolroom. In this show, simplicity is the order of the day, and this creative team nailed it.
The play itself has two predominant components. The primary arc is a story of four non-native actors, well, three actors and a history teacher, trying to develop a play that tells the story of Thanksgiving for an elementary school audience. The teacher, Caden, keeps muddying the water with his facts, explaining the history of what really was the first Thanksgiving in America, while couple Logan and Jaxton are so worried about being politically correct and not offending anyone, they are literally locked up and unable to make any sort of decision about the content of the play, the characters, or the message. Meanwhile, Alicia is an actress from Hollywood who was supposed to be the one to bring the native voice to the proceedings, Logan’s grant depended on it, but as it turned out, she only played natives, she wasn’t actually native herself, so at the end of the day, the group of four had absolutely no native voices with which they could tell the story of Thanksgiving. The second part of the play includes a series of vignettes that illustrate how lessons used to be (and in some cases still are) taught in our classrooms, how racism proliferates our culture through the education of our youth. There is a freedom here for each theatre company to create these vignettes in whichever manner they want. Woodinville Rep has chosen to make their own pre-produced and recorded videos, presented as school films for the audience. Each one was extremely well done, professional in their less than professional look, and each provided a particular lesson for the audience to learn from watching. The whole play is a lesson, but it’s never preachy, it’s told in such a smart way. Anyone who say it will never look at Thanksgiving the same again, but at the same time will also never look at unwavering political correctness the same again either. In a time when “woke” is in everyone’s personal vocabulary, it’s something worth pondering.
The Woodinville Rep production was presented with an excellent cast, small but extremely talented. Playing couple Logan and Jaxton were Joanna Hardie and Mark Fox, respectively. They began the show speaking and acting as a couple, but before the other members of the group arrived, the two began their “uncoupling” process, ostensibly so that they wouldn’t act as a pair in front of others to keep their relationship professional. Both characters are extremely politically correct, making sure they don’t offend anyone, measuring their words, actions, and reactions carefully. It’s all done in a way that pokes fun at it, but it never really mocks the behavior, however as tensions rise those walls come down and those words and actions aren’t measured quite so much. That’s when the humor of the play takes off, the lesson being that perhaps it’s better to just meet somewhere in the middle. Joanna and Mark had a great chemistry on stage, both extremely funny on their own and together. Jay Cross played history teacher Caden. Jay’s Caden was overly enthusiastic, so much so that he not only brought all of his notes with him, he had written an entire treatment of the Thanksgiving story. Caden is the funniest of the characters here and Jay’s delivery was spectacular. Rounding out the cast was Natalee Merrill as Alicia, the Hollywood actor in to bring a native voice to the work, until she doesn’t. Alicia is simple, she just wants to act, nothing more, nothing less. She’s a bit….ditzy, more interested in how she looks than anything else, but seems to be intrigued at the ideal of participating. It’s a more complicated character than one might imagine, and I like the way that Natalee played her. She’s also nailed the hair flip!
It’s important to make sure that all voices that are part of an historical event are heard and that each side’s stories are included in the telling. As such, the native side of the Thanksgiving story has largely been left out, and The Thanksgiving Play asks what position we as non-native people are in to be able to tell a complete story. Woodinville Rep wanted to make sure that there was native representation in this production, so they called upon Nikki Suyama as their Cultural Advisor. Nikki is the Artistic Director for Red Eagle Soaring (RES) Native Youth Theatre, which offers native youth a path to empowerment through the performing arts. Woodinville Rep further supported RES by making a donation to the organization. More can be learned about their mission at https://www.redeaglesoaring.org/.
How complete is our history when only part of the story is being told? On the other hand, how accurate is our history when we try to tell it in a way that won’t offend anyone? Our history is both multi-sided and offensive, it’s not pretty. The Thanksgiving Play looks at both of these in the context of a group of four teacher/actors trying to develop a play about Thanksgiving to be presented to elementary school students. Told with a ton of humor that uses common stereotypes to highlight the shortcomings in the way we’ve looked at history through the years, this cast of four taught us more than they ever could to an audience of elementary students, about how we look at history, how we consider our conversations, and what the value (or harm) in being so politically correct is.
The Woodinville Rep production of Thanksgiving Play closed this past weekend at The Restaurant at DeLille Cellars in Woodinville. For more information about the company and its next production, Silent Sky, which opens in February, visit their website at https://www.woodinvillerep.org/.
Photo Credit: Sandro Menzel
