Review: THE THANKSGIVING PLAY at ETC

“The Thanksgiving Play,” now playing at ETC, takes a comic look at four grown-ups who tie themselves in knots crafting a Thanksgiving play for an elementary school.

Theater teacher Logan (Devin Sidell) has secured a number of cultural grants from funders who want to see indigenous people and hear their perspectives. Everyone earnestly wants to decolonize Thanksgiving. This earnestness is the object of the play's satire. 

Logan is a white woman surrounded who surrounds herself with white collaborators. Because he works for free, she has brought in her actor-manqué boyfriend Jaxton (Adam Hagenbuch) to help devise this theater piece. Elementary school teacher Caden, (in a subtle performance by Will Block) is sidelined because his historical knowledge interferes with their creative flow. Logan's token Native American actor-collaborator, Alicia (Ashley Platz), turns out to be as white as Sonja Hennie. There’s a pointed critique in the show of a type of liberal earnestness that cares more about how things seem rather than how they are. 

The situation sets up a boiling cauldron of cultural sensitivity and the characters have to walk over it on a tightrope. They repeatedly fall in. That’s the fun of it. 

The production also pokes fun at a certain kind of theater-maker. Adam Hagenbuch as Jaxton, for example, physicalizes the character’s pretensions to professionalism, perennially vocalizing, stretching, centering, and grounding himself to much hilarity. As a whole, the play mocks creative processes that pretend to be without hierarchies of power. “The Thanksgiving Play” lends greater nuance to this vein of its satire. 

You may not have time to reflect on that during the show. Director Brian MacDonald keeps the pace of the humor hurling forward throughout. The cast has a rollicking good time on the journey, particularly with the bawdier, more physicalized bits of comedy. 

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