You can’t carry a play on the strength of a single joke–not even a briskly paced, well-acted, 90-minute one-act like The Thanksgiving Play, which opened Sunday at Steppenwolf.
The premise of the joke: Modern American society, and in particular theater, has gone so far down the path of political correctness, sensitivity and DEI that it has run into a dead end of stifled creativity and inherent contradictions, ironically thwarting the original intention to elevate marginalized voices and dismantle systems of oppression.
Larissa FastHorse’s satire is set in a public school rehearsal space where three incredibly earnest theater makers and a professional actress brought in for her supposed Native American bona fides gather to craft a 45-minute play about Thanksgiving for grade schoolers.
The performances are a hoot, especially Audrey Francis as Logan, a theater instructor on the verge of being fired after 300 parents signed a petition to remove her for staging The Iceman Cometh with a cast of children. She knows this play is her last shot at saving her job, but her ridiculously fastidious devotion to social consciousness makes it impossible for her to craft a crowd-pleasing tale for the kids. Millions of turkeys are slaughtered every year in service of the holiday, after all, she notes–before hastily mentioning the small matter of Thanksgiving essentially whitewashing Native genocide.
As a street performer named Jaxton (because, of course), Nate Santana is out to prove he’s even more woke than Logan, who’s his girlfriend, even though they would never use such a fraught and loaded word. They are joined by Caden (delightfully rendered by Tim Hopper), a history teacher and frustrated playwright who’s starstruck by Logan and Jaxton.
Into this mix comes Alicia, a high-priced actress from L.A. hired with grant money earmarked for lifting up Indigenous voices. Paloma Nozicka plays the blissfully normal and admittedly not so bright Alicia as something of a cut-the-crap truth teller whose charming and physically attractive presence pierces the woke bubble to reveal two straight men who have the hots for her and a woman eager to learn the alluring secrets of makeup and hair flips in spite of herself.
Hopper and Francis, the two ensemble members in the show, seem to be having a great time throughout, and they elevate the material as much as they possibly can. Director Jess McLeod keeps everyone moving with increasingly frenetic set pieces, including one involving blood-spurting severed heads from a nearby Spirit Halloween store. Nozicka makes the most of her Steppenwolf debut and is a talent to watch. Santana does what he can with a one-note role, but his character reads a lot like Mr. Van Driessen, the crunchy granola teacher Mike Judge has deployed to satirize woke culture for decades on Beavis & Butt-Head.
Several over-the-top punchlines land at the outset, but soon a stultifying sameness makes itself evident as the core satirical note is hit over and over and over again. Even Alicia is converted into the convoluted, ultra-sensitive mindset of her three creative collaborators. Thus bound together, they proceed down the most ruinous creative path imaginable until they’re left unable to express any creative thought whatsoever lest it offend someone, somewhere for some reason.
FastHorse presents a wildly exaggerated version of a genuine creative struggle happening in the American theater, in which well-intentioned white people appear to be badly missing the point. But FastHorse doesn’t explore any potential solutions. What’s worse, nearly a decade after she wrote this piece, the “go woke, go broke” America of Ron DeSantis has co-opted the play’s core message in service of decidedly sinister ends. One gets the uneasy sense that the MAGA minions would embrace this play, if only they had the habit of attending theater. PC culture appears to be the least of our problems these days, especially this straw man (straw person?) version of it.
Ultimately, The Thanksgiving Play proves as exhausting as hearing a kid practice the same guitar chord again and again. Pretty soon, you just want to peace out and maybe check back in again when they’ve learned a full song.
The Thanksgiving Play runs through June 2 at Steppenwolf Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Michael Brosilow
