'The Thanksgiving Play' review: Larissa FastHorse's play, which opened Thursday night in New York by Second Stage, is a funny and cutting piece of work that suffers from its own moral earnestness.
Chris Sullivan and Scott Foley in"The Thanksgiving Play" at the Hayes Theater in New York.
The play both wants to send up Broadway lefties and such progressive jargon as “mutually supportive relationship,” “holding space for you” and even loudly spoken but conventional pronoun declarations, but it is also committed to redemptive justice. It’s just hard to pull off both at once in 90 minutes of stage time, especially since satire works best when it takes down people who clearly have oppressive power, which is not so much the case here.
Alas for her, and for the veracity of the project, Carden’s character is white, albeit perhaps with “a bit of Spanish.” She has several reels, all suggesting different ethnicities, just to increase her chances at getting hired. They recover from that disappointment. But their subsequent efforts to really depict the violence suffered by Native Americans in Thanksgiving’s name ends up being as offensive as it is pathetic.
“Thanksgiving Play” has been well-received in other productions both in New York and regionally, and thus I suspect it has had much funnier and deeper ranging interpretations than this one, which is just not really staged with an eye to comedy.
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