‘The Thanksgiving Play’ serves a satirical feast that Broadway audiences can devour
The Thanksgiving Play marks the first play by a female Indigenous playwright on Broadway (that we know of). In it, a well-meaning high school drama teacher, Logan (Katie Finneran), her wannabe actor boyfriend Jaxton (Scott Foley), and an over-enthusiastic history teacher/playwright, Caden (Chris Sullivan, This Is Us), come together with the help of several grants and at the behest of a school board, to put on a Thanksgiving play to honor Native American Heritage Month.
Being all white but trying to be sensitive, they hire a professional Indigenous actor, Alicia (D’Arcy Carden, of The Good Place), but quickly learn that she’s actually white.
Together, the group of four white people attempts to collectively devise a politically correct piece of theater about Indigenous people, but without any Indigenous people.Alex Newell returns to Broadway in “Shucked,” but is the former “Glee” star enough to carry this nutrient-deficient new musical?The Thanksgiving Play is both a hilarious comedy and an effective satire, a crystal clear portrait of the excesses, hypocrisies, mental gymnastics, and sometimes emptiness of so-called wokeness, particularly within the (experimental) theater community.
Over the course of 90 minutes, we watch the characters, particularly Logan and Jaxton, trip over themselves to sound the most sensitive, justify their creative decisions, and outdo one another as if competing for a trophy for most enlightened.
