Woke Gone Wrong at HTC’s Season Opener: 'The Thanksgiving Play' Serves Up Laughs, Landmines and a Lesson in What Not To Do When Staging a Holiday Pageant

On Thursday, Hampton Theatre Company opens its 2025–26 season with “The Thanksgiving Play.” Written by Larissa FastHorse, it premiered in 2018 and was the first play to be performed on Broadway that had been written by a female Indigenous playwright.

Directed by Mary Powers, this show marks the start of a three-year initiative at HTC to open each season with a female-led production. The goal is to spotlight plays written and directed by women in order to address the longstanding gender imbalance in American theater, as well as on Long Island. The initiative, called the Jane Stanton Celebrating Women in Theatre Project, is funded by a recent anonymous grant to HTC from a private charitable foundation.

In “The Thanksgiving Play,” a group of four well-meaning, but culturally insensitive, white theater artists attempt to create a politically correct elementary school play about the first Thanksgiving that is respectful of the Indigenous people.

“They are not so great at that,” Powers said in a recent interview.

As the play unfolds in a classroom, the four characters navigate misstep after misstep in their misguided efforts to create this Thanksgiving pageant. For Logan, (Lindsey Sanchez), it is a desperate effort to save her job as a high school drama teacher. Caden (Scott Joseph Butler) is an elementary school history teacher helping Logan maintain historical accuracy and Logan’s boyfriend, Jaxton (Jason Moreland) is overly concerned with political correctness. Then there is Alicia (Molly Brennan) an actress hired to provide the Indigenous perspective, who is, in fact, not actually Indigenous herself.

“If you first read the play, you might think it’s very straightforward, but there are a lot of interesting themes that are explored in the play, things that we ended up talking about and discussing — what kind of message that Larissa FastHorse was trying to convey,” Powers said. “It’s not just about bias and racism. It’s not just about any one thing. There’re a lot of different ideas that are threaded throughout it.”

With this show, Powers hopes that audiences come away thinking about their own biases, both conscious and unconscious — “to think about what it is that, maybe, they have not thought through clearly when you’re talking about people that are not like you.”

Hampton Theatre Company’s production of “The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse runs Thursday, October 16, through Sunday, November 2, at Quogue Community Hall, 125 Jessup Avenue. Showtimes are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Post-show talkbacks will be offered on Fridays, October 24 and 31, offering deeper insight into the social issues raised in the production. Tickets are $40, $36 for seniors, $30 for veterans and Native Americans, and $25 for students. For tickets, visit hamptontheatre.org.

Michelle Trauring