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| Jesse Hinson and Amanda Collins in The Thanksgiving Play at Boston's Lyric Stage. (Photo: Glen Perry) |
The idea behind Larissa Fasthorse’s
The Thanksgiving Play,
which is receiving its Boston premiere at
Lyric Stage (Playwrights Horizon
staged the world premiere last year), is delectable. A high school drama
teacher named Logan (Amanda Collins) has received several grants to devise
and direct a Thanksgiving play, to be performed for her students, that is
sensitive to all the contemporary liberal concerns. She has assembled three
collaborators who will double as her fellow performers – Jaxton (Jesse
Hinson), her sort-of boyfriend, who calls himself a professional actor but
whose entire résumé seems to consist of street performances; an elementary
schoolteacher named Caden (Barlow Adamson) with a passion for history who
has done extensive research on the history of the holiday; and Alicia
(Grace Experience), an actress whose Native American background was the
linchpin assuring that Logan would be awarded one of those grants. But at
the first rehearsal Logan discovers that Alicia isn’t native at all; she’s
vaguely ethnic – she
probably has some Spanish in her genes – and
has amassed a series of head shots that make her look like she can play
characters from a variety of cultures. It’s a promising joke; Fasthorse’s
satirical point is that the effort of woke white folks like Logan and
Jaxton to do obeisance to all the current PC mandates (like the one against
cultural appropriation) and popular assumptions of guilt (like the notion
that any straight white person is de facto an abuser of privilege) ends up
getting them hopelessly entangled in contradictions.
