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by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Vinetta Strombergs

Pop-Up Theatre Canada presented by David & Hannah Mirvish, CAA Theatre, 652 Yonge Street, Toronto

October 3-20, 2024

Logan: “We have created nothing”

It would be easy to joke that The Thanksgiving Play is a real turkey, but I feel sorry for turkeys this time of year. Larissa FastHorse’s 2018 play is labelled as a comedy, but it received the most tepid applause on opening night of any play in recent memory. Throughout its 100 minutes there was not one bout of hearty communal laughter from the audience. Instead, there were only scattered titters that popped up here and there and nothing more. I assume that Pop-Up Theatre Canada’s production had a better reception in its home in Alberta. But here the play’s multiple flaws were all too apparent.

Set in an unused classroom somewhere in Los Angeles. the play is a satire of political correctness among White people who have been tasked with producing a 45-minute-long play about American Thanksgiving for elementary schools. One female-identifying person, Logan, is the director, but she is under threat of dismissal due to a petition by parents about the previous play she directed. She has to make good on this Thanksgiving play or her career is over. Her male-identifying partner is Jaxton, a street performer and yoga-enthusiast. Together they delight in proving their wokeness to each other through their mastery of all the euphemisms and circumlocutions that woke people use to avoid offending each other and all the hypersensitive people they imagine to be around them.

Rather improbably, Logan has been accorded a number of grants to create and produce this school play, including one to allow her to hire a professional Native American actor. She does this based on a headshot she has seen online and has come up with Alicia. Also, to help keep the play accurate, she has asked the local history teacher (an amateur playwright) Caden to join them.

The humour of the first half of the play is focussed on the deferential way that Logan and Jaxton treat Alicia. They feel they need to seek to approval for every detail of the production since she has an “authentic” voice. The second half of the play focusses on the turmoil that Logan and Jaxton face when they realize, long after the audience does, that Alicia is not a Native American. Alicia is proud that her features can represent several ethnicities and has headshots of herself styled as six different ethnic groups in her profile.

This summary may make the play sound amusing, but it is not. The play is like a 10-minute-long sketch satirizing wokeness that has been stretched out to ten times its length. Basically, FastHorse presents us with the same joke ad nauseam, namely White people competing in performative wokeness. We get the joke when we first meet Logan and Jaxton and their elaborate rituals of permission-asking and non-offensiveness. Alicia being thought of Native and causing distress when found to be White are just two variants of the same joke.

People might think that the language of political correctness is inherently funny, but it is not. In itself, its tortuous circumlocutions and reassurances of allyship are as dull as any type of new officialese. Correct modes of speaking do not admit of any whiff of humour since their purpose is so deadly serious. Logan’s adding of preferred pronouns to names when she introduces everyone does not provoke gales of laughter because it’s pedantic and tedious.

The way to satirize people who have adopted an unusual way of expressing themselves is to have at least one character who does not understand the new language or who wants to learn how to speak it. Molière satirizing groups using a specialized language at least twice – once in Les Précieuse ridicules (1659) and again in Le Malade imaginaire (1673). In the first he makes fun of the 17th-century fad for préciosité where women, primarily, decide that it is too vulgar to use the ordinary names for everyday things and so invent circumlocutions to ennoble themselves by renaming everything around them. In the second Molière satirizes the language of medicine as the means doctors use to hide their ignorance to make themselves seem knowledgeable. The title character is initiated into this language at the conclusion. Both these plays are classics of comedy because of the contrast between the people who do and do not speak a certain idiom.

In The Thanksgiving Play, FastHorse has two characters, Alicia and Caden, who could potentially act as outside voices to Logan and Jaxton and point out the foolishness of how they speak and act. But she does not do this. Somehow, Alicia and Caden listen to all of Logan and Jaxton’s tortuous ways of expressing themselves and apparently understand them without ever asking them why they are speaking in such a fashion.

In 2015 when FastHorse wrote the play, the kind of wokespeak that Logan and Jaxton use was new. Now, nine years later, it has crept into the language of human resources and social services in every institution and making fun of it has become a daily source of amusement for many.

In addition to the datedness of the satire and the tedium of endless repetition, an even more fundamental problem is that we don’t care about any of the characters or their project. If we don’t care about anything in the play, what is there to hold our interest?

FastHorse ineptly tries to spice up the action by having Jaxton and Caden surreptitiously vie for the interest of the sensuous Alicia. Logan notices Alicia’s power of attraction and wants Alicia to teach her. What follows is a rehash of the scene between Glinda and Elphaba in Wicked including the teaching of how to toss one’s hair properly.

Director Vinetta Strombergs takes exactly the wrong approach to a text like this. Instead of speeding it up, she slows it down as if she thinks we need time to catch every nuance of Fasthorse’s accurate reflection of ultra-political correctness. As I said, we don’t need time. We get in the first five minutes and FastHorse’s hammering at for 95 more minutes doesn’t make it funnier.

Before the play proper begins and popping up twice at breaks in the action are videos projected on the back wall of the set. The first two are racist counting games FastHorse found on the internet. In the first Elley Rae Henessy goes over the top in playing an unhinged elementary school teacher singing “The Twelve Days of Thanksgiving” in which each gift is a one stereotypically associated with native Americans. In the second Eric Woolfe is a puppeteer illustrating a counting game with finger puppets where killing Native people or their suicide is meant to help kids with numbers. The last video shows children singing US patriotic anthems while a montage of mascots or advertisements objectifying Native Americans fills the screen. In terms of the volume of response, the audience on opening night reacted more volubly to these videos than to anything in the play on stage.

The actors cannot be faulted. Rachel Cairns plays Logan as so earnest and humourless as to be dull. Colin A. Doyle has a bit more room to interpret his role as Jaxton, who is newer to wokeness than Logan and is still trying not to put a foot wrong. Craig Lauzon does provoke some amusement when he shows how happy Caden is to be involved in a real play. The one actor who actually is allowed to be funny is Jada Rifkin as Alicia. Rifkin is excellent at playing a dumb brunette (the character labels herself as dumb) by emphasizing the vacant look of someone who has become used to not understanding fully what is happening. Alicia insists that all she knows how to do is act, and when the play turns to improvisation, Rifkin shows us that Alicia has a better grasp of how to perform effectively, if too big, than the other three.

The Mirvish website claims that The Thanksgiving Play was “A hit on Broadway”. That is untrue. The Play had 30 previews and 61 performances before it closed which pretty clearly marks it as a flop. It was one of the most produced plays in the US, but as early critics have pointed out, that is because, depressingly enough, it does not ask for an ethnically diverse cast. What is noteworthy is that FastHorse is the first known Native American woman ever to have a play on Broadway.

Canada does not have the same problem that the US does. The National Arts Centre has an Indigenous Theatre division. Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts is currently in its 41st year of producing Indigenous theatre. Regular theatregoers in Canada would have no trouble naming famous Indigenous Canadian plays, playwrights or actors. Since Canada has such wealth of talent, it would have much been better if Pop-Up Theatre Canada had chosen one of the many plays FastHorse has said she can’t get produced because of their Imdigenous casting, rather an empty, inane play like The Thanksgiving Play written for and about White people.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Craig Lauzon as Caden, Colin A. Doyle as Jaxton, Jada Rifkin as Alicia and Rachel Cairns as Logan; Colin A. Doyle as Jaxton and Rachel Cairns as Logan; Rachel Cairns as Logan, Jada Rifkin as Alicia, Colin A. Doyle as Jaxton and Craig Lauzon as Caden. © 2024 Dahlia Katz. 

For tickets visit: www.mirvish.com.

NOTE:

The first version of this review contained the following paragraph:

“One curious aspect of the Pop-Up Theatre Canada production is the casting of Craig Lauzon, who is of mixed settler and Anishinabe decent. FastHorse has said that she was tired of producers telling her that her plays could not be staged because there weren’t enough Native American actors to act in them. Her response was to write The Thanksgiving Play in which there are only four White characters, and the absence of a Native American actors is one of the play’s main plot points. Paradoxically for a play satirizing wokeness, Pop-Up Theatre Canada has cast an Indigenous Canadian actor to play a White person. There is noting wrong with Lauzon or his performance. It’s just that Pop-Up Theatre Canada is disrespecting the wishes of a Native American playwright and seemingly ignoring her action of protest in writing the play.”

On October 5, Mr. Lauzon wrote this in response:

“Didn’t go against the playwrights wishes by casting an Indigenous person in The Thanksgiving Play. It is Infact her greatest wish to have the play done by an all ‘white passing’ cast from whatever background. It is Infact in the actual script notes. Presumptuous of you to think you know the playwright’s wishes.”

I was unaware that FastHorse had asked for a “White passing” cast in the script and thus retract the paragraph above now that I have more information since I do want to be as accurate as possible.

I sincerely apologize for any upset caused by my remarks.

Chris Hoile, Editor