The Thanksgiving Play, at BCT

Or: The Try-Hards

There’s no good way to sugarcoat a turd, (especially when that leaving is the size of couple of continents and been mouldering for three hundred odd years) but that doesn’t stop people from trying. In Larissa Fasthorse’s Thanksgiving Play, Logan (Jamie Nebeker) drama teacher of public school and her creative partner Jaxton (John Patrick O’Brien) have determined to create the perfectly pleasing accurate and educational Thanksgiving Play for their students. With the help of historical teacher and secret playwright Caden (Nick Jordan) and a Hollywood actress Alicia (Clair Blackwelder) they seek to intersectionalize the holiday from the greater possible number of vectors and pull of a theatrical revolution that will explode their students heads all across the auditorium.

A small meta-theatrical sidetone dear reader: Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota) a very successful playwright and choreographer was having difficulty having her plays produced because so few theaters could “find” Native American actors for the parts. So she wrote a farce with an All White cast doing extremely All White things, and it’s become the darling of the American Theater. Irony aside, The Thanksgiving Play stands on its own merits and has made Fasthorse a name for herself and platform, as great things do grow from suspicious soil.

The name of the game is Cringe Comedy, and it kicks off with projected “lessons” that stitch the action together that are so horrifically accurate they take the breath from the audience in one gigantic oof. The moments of spiritual and ideological buffoonery set of cascades of winces and titters as each of the characters spin in a private orrery, a little mechanical universe designed to feed their heads more and more thoroughly up their own rectums. It’s great comedy, the jokes are toothed and vicious and varied in all kinds of humor, but watching four different spinning machines only becomes engaging when they start to engage and interlock with each other.

Nebeker sparks as Logan’s unbearable earnestness, her zest to tear down the old forms of everything, but it truly shines when she’s placed in position to Blackwelder’s Alicia, her secret ideal. Blackwelder’s performance passes through stereotype and out the other side into brilliance (see her study in ceilings). Jordan’s wide-ranging physical comedy, the spasming of Caden’s anxiety, mesh with O’brein’s abiding presence in Jaxton’s search for greater place in the universe that only makes him smaller. Each nails their jokes and nudge each other closer so that the cogs of the play can interlock and start spinning.

Farce is notoriously hard to put hand in hand with philosophy, but somehow Fasthorse manages to land her points, and creates an improbable ending that is somehow feels inevitable and totally right. The play is painful in many ways and hits hardest when it tucks to the personal and not the political, but despite the mire it remains a treasure chest of laughs, with some gems of truths buried underneath.