A PLAY TO BE THANKFUL FOR
Director Tara Moses (Seminole Nation of Oklahoma/Mvskoke) leans into the challenge of bringing the satirical comedy The Thanksgiving Play to the stage with “a full cast of Native and actors of color.” The casting note for the published play, by Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and the first indigenous woman playwright to have a successful Broadway run, says “BIPOC that can pass as white should be considered for all characters.” Moses says that the Moonbox Production presently at Arrow Street Arts is the first production to do so. The cast and director are not the only native people involved in this production. Assistant Director Dillon Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw, Laguna, Isleta Pueblo), Costume Designer Asa Benally (Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation), Dramaturg/Assistant Props Designer Kailey Bennett (Cherokee Nation), and Director of Artistic Sign Language Ryan Worden (Seneca) also bring a native perspective to this play that both entertains and challenges.
Ohad Ashkenazi, Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed, Marisa Diamond and Johnny Gordon
Set entirely in an elementary school classroom, the play pokes fun at well-meaning white people and what passes for education about the history of indigenous people of the United States. Jasmine Goodspeed (Nipmuc) is Logan, a white teaching artist whose position is in jeopardy because 300 parents have signed a petition calling for her removal. Nonetheless, she has received funding to create a play that will portray the true story of Thanksgiving in a manner that is age-appropriate, honest, and palatable to parents, funders, and her local school district. Her partner Jaxton (Johnny Gordon) plays a straight white male yoga teacher and street performer. The two of them are so earnestly conscious of their privilege as white Americans that they must discuss the implications of each decision they make and nearly every word they speak.
Jasmine Rochelle Goodspeed and Johnny GordonThey are joined by Caden (Chad Ashkenazi), another teacher and a history nerd whose role in the project is to provide historical accuracy, and by Alicia (Marisa Diamond, Maya Q’eqchi’ & Ashkenazi). Having received funding to hire an indigenous performer for her play, Logan has hired Alicia, whose agent has marketed her as Native American as well as several other ethnicities. In a plot twist reminiscent of Yellow Face, Alicia turns out not to be indigenous after all, but not before Logan and Jaxton have patronized her with their cringe-worthy efforts to “honor” her perspective. The revelation of Alicia’s non-native identity leaves Logan with the challenge of directing a play that includes native characters but with no native performers to play them.
The CastThese four set out to create a devised play, a play in which they create a script by inhabiting the setting and the characters. Their efforts to do this while negotiating the thin line their circumstances allow (the Pilgrims were religious, but they cannot depict them praying because they are performing in a public school; there were other harvest festivals by both native people and European settlers in Florida and Texas before the Massachusetts event took place, but that’s not what people want to see) grow increasingly hilarious, eventually devolving into a sex comedy based on a description of turkey meat.
The play is punctuated with songs from educators’ sites that offer disturbingly and yet comically racist depictions of U.S. and native history. Songs like “The Nine Days of Thanksgiving,” in which “the natives gave to me” moccasins, teepees, tom toms, woven blankets, etc.
The Cast
Moses brings the play to Massachusetts with several local references. We see the state flag, which portrays a native person with a sword dangling over his head. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who apologized in 2019 for falsely claiming to be Cherokee, makes an appearance. Having seen the Broadway version of The Thanksgiving Play, Moses explains her determination to grapple with what she and other members of the production team saw as the very painful portrayal of a massacre of native people.
This version puts a fresh spin on that element of the play, but it’s a spin that is equally shocking and yet offers a fresh layer of meaning to the quandary in which the characters find themselves. They feel obliged to tell the story of native people, and yet they have brought no native people into the story. The solution, as these characters see it, is far from satisfactory, and yet it is the solution chosen by many/most white people when faced with the painful legacy of history.
photos by Sharman Altshuler
The Thanksgiving Play
Moonbox Productions
Arrow Street Arts, 2 Arrow St in Cambridge, MA
Thurs at 7:30; Fri at 8; Sat at 2 & 8; Sun at 2
ends on Dec. 15, 2024
for tickets ($45), visit Arrow St. Arts or Moonbox
