‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Broadway Review: No Meat on These Bones

Eight years is pretty close to eternity when it comes to current humor expiration dates, which may be one of the reasons for the gags in Larissa FastHorse’s Broadway comedy The Thanksgiving Game fall flat like a half-baked pie. We can only assume that when she began writing this satire of liberal guilt, awakened sensibilities, and sticky indulgence in 2015, words like “disengagement” and “soy milk” came across as major punch lines.

Open tonight at the Hayes Theatre, The Thanksgiving GameDirected by Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812) and starring D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley and Chris Sullivan – all of whom, director and cast, have done much better work on other stages – is the kind of targeted satire that really needs to be honed. New York The public sees its own weaknesses and smiles at its own political vulnerabilities.

So what exactly is going wrong this Thanksgiving? Start with the soup, end with the nuts.

Set in an elementary school classroom, the play follows four white adults—an acting teacher, her former actor boyfriend “Yoga Guy,” a high school history teacher, and a Los Angeles actress mistakenly assumed to be of Indian descent. Performance of this year’s Thanksgiving game. Determined to give a politically correct account of the history of the Pilgrim Indian Party, the liberal teacher and her equally sincere friend recruit this historian and would-be teacher, as well as the actress they believe represents a non-white perspective.

From the beginning, the premise asks a lot of the audience. Are we supposed to believe an elementary school production is a professional actress from Los Angeles? That even in the post-George Floyd era (he was even name-checked) there is actual government “diversity money” at stake for such productions? That even the most ignorant do-gooders can have an exchange like the one where they ask the not-so-Native American actress about her family’s holiday traditions.

“We just ate and watched games,” she says.

“What kind of games?” They ask.

“Just the ones everyone’s looking at,” she replies, a response the audience understands, even if the idiots on stage don’t.

Asked how she can learn more about those games, the actress says, “I think the Chiefs play on Monday, right?”

If the answer comes: “Is there a whole game just for chiefs? That’s great!”

Such far-fetched lines pile up like so many Thanksgiving turkey legs, the dialogue as inexplicable as the sudden appearance of bloodied human heads (this is grade school, please remember, even if the playwright doesn’t), and uncharacteristic plots (yoga man somehow gets way left his hands blue and will do anything for Braveheart).

Interspersed throughout the fictional bustle are video projections of school children reciting thanksgiving songs, seemingly life-like, horribly racist and violent. It is unclear exactly when these grotesques were written, but they make clearer statements than anything else that happens on stage.

title: The Thanksgiving Game
Location: Hayes Theater on Broadway
Director: Rachel Chavkin
Playwright: Larissa Fast horse
Form: D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley and Chris Sullivan
Time: 80 minutes (without an intermission)