Theater Review: ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ looks at holiday’s origin

The cast of Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of

The cast of Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of "The Thanksgiving Play," from left: Amy Hutchins, Scott Sweatt, Michael Stewart Allen and Laura Woyasz. The production runs through Oct. 13 at the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. (Caitlin Gomes photograph) Caitlin Gomes photograph

Laura Woyasz plays an actress from Los Angeles in Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of Larissa FastHorse's satire of American mythmaking

Laura Woyasz plays an actress from Los Angeles in Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of Larissa FastHorse's satire of American mythmaking "The Thanksgiving Play." (Caitlin Gomes photograph) Caitlin Gomes photograph

Michael Stewart Allen, left and Amy Hutchins appear in a scene from Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of

Michael Stewart Allen, left and Amy Hutchins appear in a scene from Shaker Bridge Theatre's production of "The Thanksgiving Play" at Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. (Caitlin Gomes photograph) —

By ALEX HANSON

Valley News Staff Writer

Published: 10-02-2024 5:01 PM

Thanksgiving has always seemed to me the greatest of our holidays. The idea of a harvest festival, where families or tribes gather to celebrate their agricultural labors with a generous feast, might be outdated in the era of factory farming, but the need for gratitude is real.

If there’s a problem with Thanksgiving, it’s in the stories we tell ourselves about it. Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play,” now in production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in White River Junction, revolves around how we run the risk of ruining a perfectly good holiday by weighing it down with more mythology than any one meal can bear.

FastHorse, whose play was the first Broadway production for a female Native American playwright, has some fun with the stories we tell ourselves about the origins of Thanksgiving. While Shaker Bridge wrings some laughs out of the show, the play’s satirization of American mythology is too thought-provoking to foster a rollicking comedy.

The play follows Logan, a young actor, director and teacher who has received some grants to create and perform a culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play for an elementary school audience. She and her boyfriend, Jaxton, a self-described “yoga dude,” await the arrival of their fellow actors, Caden, a local history teacher who wants to be a playwright, and Alicia, a Los Angeles actress hired for her Native American heritage.

Thanks to Logan and Jaxton’s sensitivities, things quickly go awry. The former is a committed vegan who abhors any idea that animals might have been exploited, but Jaxton puts out cheese on the table of refreshments for the actors. Logan calls Thanksgiving “the holiday of death,” and later notes that 45 million turkeys are sacrificed each year. But her job is under a cloud, with parents circulating petitions for Logan’s ouster. Jaxton warns her that to win them back, she’ll have to kill a turkey.

Mockery of liberals tying themselves into knots to avoid offending anyone is an equal opportunity pursuit. Though they don’t mean to, when Caden and Alicia arrive they repeatedly puncture the bubble-wrap in which Logan and Jaxton have packaged themselves, Caden by citing facts and Alicia by operating in a kind of fact-free zone of total self-possession.

A clutch of actors familiar to Shaker Bridge audiences carries the play along. As Logan, Amy Hutchins communicates the right mix of earnestness and calculation, and Michael Stewart Allen conveys Jaxton’s sense of self-actualized futility. Alicia comes off as a ditz, but is laser-focused on her own work, and Laura Woyasz’ portrayal captures that contradiction. And Scott Sweatt presents Caden as a thoughtful, if thwarted writer who nonetheless perseveres.

Logan has called them together to devise a play that will tell the Thanksgiving story. It’s a struggle. How can they, as white folk, craft a piece of theater that honors Native American heritage? For the audience, the joy in watching them try stems in part from the knowledge that it was a Native American woman who put these struggling people on paper and on the stage.

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As directed by Bill Coons, Shaker Bridge’s founder and artistic director, “The Thanksgiving Play” breezes through its 85 minutes. While the audience laughed often during the Saturday night performance I saw, it was a knowing, rather than an uproarious kind of laughter. In a way, one might wish the production was slower, so the laughs would land more heavily, but I can also see the need to keep a steady tempo. With the exception of the impervious Alicia, these are nervous characters, buzzing with an energy they only fitfully understand.

It’s worth acknowledging that the Thanksgiving holiday has local origins. It was a Newport native, Sarah Josepha Hale, who lobbied several presidents for the establishment of Thanksgiving Day. It wasn’t until Abraham Lincoln saw the holiday as a way to unite the country, then riven by the Civil War, that it finally turned into legislation, in 1863. This might be a better origin story than the one we all learned in grade school, about Pilgrims and Native Americans breaking bread together in 1621.

“The Thanksgiving Play” is on the list of the 10 most-produced plays in the U.S. this year, which means Shaker Bridge patrons are participating in more of a mass spectacle than usual. Could it be that a play like this one will change how the nation thinks about this cherished holiday?

To say anything about the narrative the beleaguered actors in “The Thanksgiving Play” come up with would be giving away too much. Suffice it to say that when we feel an impulse to spout off about the history of Thanksgiving, maybe we ought to just shut up about it instead and ask for someone to pass the stuffing.

Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of “The Thanksgiving Play” continues through Oct. 13 in the Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. For tickets and more information, go to shakerbridgetheatre.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.