'The Thanksgiving Play' Explores the Difficulties in Telling Someone Else's Story

Whose job is it to tell our ancestors’ stories? If you’re of European heritage, you would likely say it’s the role of descendants to keep those tales alive through evidence left behind in documents like family bibles, photographs, diaries and deeds.

But what if your family stories were based purely on oral tradition and therefore never written down? What happens when ancestors are permanently silenced before they have a chance to share their traditions and knowledge with children and grandchildren? What if those children and grandchildren are silenced alongside their elders?

Then, it would appear, the telling of the stories becomes the job of the victors alone.

That is the conundrum facing a quartet of hapless theater “professionals” in “The Thanksgiving Play,” Hampton Theatre Company’s hilarious season opener at Quogue Community Hall which is directed by Mary Powers. Written by Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, in 2022 the play was the first by an Indigenous woman to be produced on Broadway. It represents a misguided study on cultural appropriation, political correctness and the frequently futile desire to tell someone else’s story.

The premise of this clever script is quite simple — a group of white educators are attempting to create an ethnically sensitive play about the first Thanksgiving for elementary school-age children. Despite the best of intentions, it quickly becomes abundantly clear that this is a very complicated issue and one that won’t be easily resolved. As the characters strive to tell the Thanksgiving story in the most politically correct and accurate way possible, they realize that those two goals are mutually exclusive and find themselves tumbling headlong into one minefield after another.

Set in a classroom, the play opens with high school drama teacher Logan (Lindsey Shanchez) anxiously conferring with her Valley Boy partner Jaxton (Jason Moreland) about the writing of the Thanksgiving script. Jaxton is an actor of sorts with a pass-the-hat-gig at the local farmer’s market (but we mustn’t pass judgment on his artistic choices) and is one of the performers who will appear in the play. For her part, though she is a committed vegan and disgusted by the idea of eating turkeys, Logan has vowed to put aside her food aversions for the sake of art and is driven to create the best play she can conjure up about the “holiday of death.”

In truth, Logan’s job is on the line due to an earlier misstep with a controversial production of “The Iceman Cometh” that left parents angry and calling for her dismissal. She is on-edge and determined to get this one right. Fortunately, she has secured a grant to promote Native American awareness through the arts and has cast an Indigenous actress who will serve as the sounding board for the Native American perspectives in the play.

Soon, the pair is joined by Caden (Scott Joseph Butler), a historian whose job is to put the facts of the first Thanksgiving in context (no matter how brutal and bloody they may be) and Alicia (Molly Brennan), the actress whom Logan has hired with the grant money. Soon, it’s life imitating farce as every ridiculous thing that Alicia says is taken as a truth to include in the play solely because she is of Indigenous heritage.

There’s only one problem. Alicia is not Native American. She simply “plays” ethnic roles and has a series of different headshots that she sends to casting directors depending on what “type” they are looking to cast. Alicia, who looks at things in an overly simplistic manner, also freely and proudly admits that she’s not very smart. That, in some bizarre way, makes her the most enlightened character on the stage.

Conversely, the language gymnastics that Logan and Jaxton engage in throughout the play is a ridiculously over-the-top crash course in self-awareness. Full of referential clarifications, unsolicited pronoun pronouncements and the rejection of stereotype or criticism in favor of enthusiastic honoring of one’s authentic instincts, “enlightened white allies” is a term that they settle on in justifying their increasingly cringey choices for the script as they find themselves painted into an ever-shrinking corner.

As new information comes to light, the group is constantly forced to redefine and reevaluate their positions and beliefs systems. Justifying their actions becomes as much of a chore as actually attempting to write the script for the play. Even between scenes the audience doesn’t get a break — a large monitor on the wall of the set projects cringe-worthy videos based on actual elementary school Thanksgiving skits gone wrong.

Representing the purely historical side of things is Caden, the nerdy historian who puts forth cold, brutal honesty based on documents written by the colonists’ first encounters with Indigenous populations. From using double-entendre terms like “exploding stick” for “gun” and the English propensity for referring to Native Americans as “savages,” to pointing out that the first Thanksgiving would have happened not in Massachusetts, but in St. Augustine, Florida, where Spanish conquistadors and southern Indigenous tribes would have enjoyed a feast of pineapple and other tropical fruits, he’s not making things any easier.

That’s because it’s the conquerors who lived to tell the tale. And that is the inherent problem Logan and Jaxton wrestle with as they try to be both accurate and sensitive in the absence of actual Indigenous representation. Despite their enlightenment, neither Logan nor Jaxton know a single Native American personally. When Caden and Jaxton recreate a scene from history depicting colonists slaughtering members of the Pequot tribe, everyone in the room realizes it’s all gone way too far.

Which is exactly how LightHorse no doubt intended it. As a Lakota, the playwright has the authority that her characters lack — that is, she gets to write the Native American perspective. But because this play is designed to be cast with only white actors, LightHorse has done that without relying on a single Indigenous voice on stage. It all ends up being very meta and LightHorse has shared in interviews that her previous plays were deemed to be unproduceable due to the difficulties in casting Native American actors.

If there’s a downside in this play, it’s that as poster children for social awareness, Logan and Jaxton ultimately end up giving “woke” a bad name. Their behavior is so overboard that someone should toss them a life preserver. While political correctness is the very foundation of this play’s humor, in this current environment it’s also an unfortunate indictment of what now seems like ancient history. Despite being written only a few years ago, this play hasn’t aged particularly well given what’s happening right now in this country. The pendulum has swung so far the other way that the mere mention of the letters DEI is enough to make someone a target.

Ironically, “The Thanksgiving Play” proves this point in a way LightHorse probably never intended. In the end, the PC police who until recently were quick to scold every misplaced pronoun or use of an outdated term may have unintentionally harmed the cause they so fervantly sought to advance. So much in this country has changed so quickly for so many, and not in a good way, including minorities, immigrants, women and the disabled, that this play already feels a lot like a period piece.

For that reason, it might also be considered a tragedy.

“The Thanksgiving Play” runs through November 2. Performances are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. An additional matinee will take place November 1, at 2:30 p.m., preceding the regular evening show. Post-show talkbacks with the director, cast and panelists are October 24 and October 31. The production is produced by George Loizides, with lighting design by Sebastian Paczynski, sound and video design by Meg Sexton and costume design by Teresa LeBrun. In addition to directing, Powers also designed the set.

This show is the first in Hampton Theatre Company’s Jane Stanton Celebrating Women in Theatre Project. Funded by a recent anonymous grant from a private charitable foundation, the goal of the new initiative is to spotlight plays written and directed by women. HTC will open each of its next three seasons with a female-led production.

Tickets are $40 for adults, $36 for seniors (65 and older), $25 for students (25 and under), and $30 for veterans and Native Americans. Quogue Community Hall is at 125 Jessup Avenue in Quogue. Tickets and more information are available at hamptontheatre.org.