My first live play of the year ended up being a last minute decision. My wife and I realized we had a Saturday evening open, and figured an evening date would be fun.
Usually, Ovation Theatre does musicals, with live band and all. Occasionally, however, they also do short runs of small cast plays that don’t need the higher overhead. The risk is lower for a low audience turnout, which was, unfortunately, the case for this performance.
The Thanksgiving Play was written by Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and is a satire that takes aim at performative wokeness by white people when it comes to Thanksgiving. It had its genesis in the work she did with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to make it less traumatizing to indigenous people.
In an interesting coincidence, I am currently reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satire of the Brook Farm utopian experiment, The Blithedale Romance. There are a lot of similarities between the works, as both skewer well-meaning but ineffective middle-to-upper class white people whose attempts to do the right thing are undermined by a lack of awareness of self and others, and a kind of self-absorption, where everything ends up being about how something makes them feel, rather than if anything is actually accomplished.
The play is about an attempt to create a Thanksgiving play for the schoolkids that is both historically accurate and also more politically correct - a balance that turns out to be nearly impossible.
For those who haven’t seen the play, it runs next weekend as well, and you can get tickets from Ovation Theater. I’m going to spoil some things about the play, so stop reading if you want to go see it.
The cast is small: Logan (Kamala Boeck), the tightly wound teacher and director of the play; Jaxton (Jason Dollar), the semi-professional actor who always does the kid shows for free; Caden (Michael Schaffer), the history teacher who dreams of being a playwright; and Alicia (Brianna Swofford), the professional hollywood actor hired using the grant money for an indigenous play.
It quickly turns out that all four have completely different goals and desires regarding the play. Alicia just wants to act and get paid - it’s literally what she does and her only meaning in life. As she says, “I’m not very smart - I’ve been tested.” Unlike the others, she has no inner conflict - whatever gets her on stage and paid is fine with her, including playing characters of various ethnicities. (Irony here: a member of the Miami Indian Tribe of Oklahoma playing a white actress who plays Native characters. Shakespeare would probably approve.) Alicia is also fascinating because she is the most dynamic character - she learns as the play goes on, while the others….don’t.
Caden is determined to have historical accuracy above everything, and writes literally a briefcase full of script - far more than could ever be used in a 45 minute school play. He is played as a nerd, with a lot of head knowledge, but little emotional intelligence.
Jaxton is the hippie - although he has a day job, he lives for his street acting and yoga. “I want to BE yoga!” He is in a romantic relationship with Logan, but it is perhaps a bit complicated. She doesn’t really respect his acting, and he has some lingering sexism he remains blind to. He has good intentions, but is so inside his own head most of the time that he can’t actually see or listen.
Logan is so tightly wound about everything that she ends up paralyzed by the challenge of doing the right thing. She wants to be in control all the time, but can’t handle the pressure or manage her actors effectively.
This already sounds kind of heavy, but the play isn’t that. It actually is laugh-out-loud hilarious throughout. FastHorse is a great joke-writer, and is able to skewer a certain kind of white leftist culture that seems more about policing the boundaries of appropriate thinking than actually changing the world for the better. This is what FastHorse calls “performative wokeness.”
Most of us have at least some experience with this type, although it isn’t (in my experience) the way most left-leaning sorts are. It is particularly prevalent in certain parts of academia and politics, just like the most toxic forms of Right-Wing thinking occurs in the equivalent ivory towers. There are times that “horseshoe theory” is applicable. (It is of limited use, but can be true in certain instances, one of which is the way that certain obnoxious far-left figures have jumped to the far-right rather seamlessly.) FastHorse based the play on her experience in theater, and says that eighty percent of the lines are literally things people have said to her. Since I grew up mostly around right wingers, and live in a right-leaning town, I personally hear a lot more of the unrepentant bigotry than the performative wokeness.
My wife and I did wonder how the play would appear to a right-wing audience. Probably funny in a not-self-aware way - the jokes land as making fun of the Left at a certain level. But, considering the audience was mostly theater regulars and theater people, who definitely skew left in this town, and we laughed, it clearly resonates with people on that side of the spectrum as well.
I mentioned above what I think the core message is, but I’ll flesh it out a bit here. While “political correctness,” “woke,” and “virtue signaling” are definitely used as a dog whistle by the right, and used as an epithet to dismiss anyone who seeks to address systemic injustices in our society, - and believe, me, I have been on the receiving end of those epithets, including from my own family - there is a certain kind of “political correctness” which gets bogged down in being right and thinking right rather than actually engaging with the real people affected. Case in point is that none of the characters actually know anyone who is Native American.
What this leads to is an increasing focus on how a white person feels about it, rather than on fixing problems. As well-meaning as Logan, Caden, and Jaxton are, they remain inside their own heads. Ironically, it is Alicia, crass and mercenary though she is, who seems most capable of actually communicating with people outside of academia. I think most people would be down with the “traditional sport” of turkey bowling, right?
In the end, all of the endless discussions and attempts to “fix” Thanksgiving, what they end up doing is nothing. Literally nothing. Which is the endgame of semantics-based activism - “performative wokeness.”
As FastHorse herself put it:
“Lots of really well-meaning white people are in charge of American theater. Over-striving to do the right thing and not screw up and not make mistakes creates this weird paralysis where real change doesn't actually happen.”
The Thanksgiving holiday is a tough one, not least because it is a modern holiday - one where the roots aren’t buried in time and obscurity. For me, it has long been my favorite of the major holidays, because of the food (which is unique and delicious) and the aspirational idea of taking a holiday to be grateful.
But there is also the whole mythology built up around it. One of the founding myths of our nation, where we pretend that our origin is in good relationships with the indigenous peoples, not a story of theft and genocide.
The problem is, there is no real way to make that story a good one. Either we go “traditional” and tell lies and pat ourselves on the back, or we tell the truth and make the holiday a real downer - perhaps not a holiday at all.
Caden tries to tie the holiday back to ancient harvest festivals, which isn’t a bad start to a rebrand, and one could also look to Abraham Lincoln, who established the US celebration as a way of attempting to heal the trauma of the Civil War. Good intentions, but not great in the execution.
As I was thinking about this, though, I realized all holidays have some sort of problematic history. And all of them are based in cultural myths. So many are celebrations of military victories. Others are variations on “we are better than everyone else.” Even an ancient harvest celebration would contain a certain element of appeasement of the gods - and the gods often call for the sacrifice of someone else. Other holidays may have fairly benign origins, but have become weaponized by certain groups. See: the Christmas Wars.
The process of curating our holidays, then, perhaps, is a process of finding meaning that is less toxic, less exclusionary, and so on. For my own evolution regarding Thanksgiving (which I still celebrate and love, even as I acknowledge the problems), I wrote a post about the true meaning of ungratefulness in a certain parable Christ told. The twin focuses of a true day of Thanksgiving: showing gratitude for what we have, and working to ensure our blessings are available to all, not just people like us.
I will also note that I have a long history of involvement with Native Americans. As a teen, I did volunteer work on the Navajo reservation, which was a real eye-opener about a lot of things. For over 20 years, I have also done legal work for tribes handling Indian Child Welfare Act cases, which also gave me an understanding of the way our country criminalizes poverty, particularly for marginalized communities.
My realization as a result of these experiences is that words are pretty damn cheap. Sure, a land acknowledgment is a good thing. But it won’t solve the ongoing effects of reservations which have been starved of financial support and infrastructure, while even that land is exploited for the benefit of large white-owned corporations. What is needed isn’t talk, but justice.
The play was excellent. Good acting, creative use of props from food fights with seaweed snacks, to football with severed heads. (Hey, historical accuracy!)
I’ll also mention that director Dakota Nash is a member of our very local Tubatulabal Tribe, and was instrumental in bringing this play to Bakersfield. They’re also excellent on stage - their one-man show of Every Brilliant Thing was excellent in every way.
I’ll end with the one really great line that I was able to remember two days later (probably not word-for-word):
Alicia: “Are you two a couple?”
Logan: “We are in a mutually respectful relationship.”
Alicia: “Okay, so you aren’t a couple.”
There were a lot of other zingers which were hilarious in context, but which I can’t remember well enough to quote. The play is a satire, it is wickedly funny, even while it is so cringe that you feel terrible about laughing. At least we know that FastHorse approves of the laughing - she has said as much in interviews.
The play doesn’t end with the expected catharsis: it ends with literal nothing. Which is of course not the way reality should end. The alternative to performative wokeness isn’t “do nothing,” and it certainly isn’t doubling down on racism like the Right is doing right now. The Thanksgiving Play is thus a look in the mirror, and an invitation that we not walk away and forget what we saw, but take the truth we have seen and translate it into genuine action directed at correcting injustice.
***
Larissa FastHorse’s interview on NPR is worth reading or listening to, for additional perspective on this play and her other works.
You can also check out the list of other posts on this blog related to Native American authors and issues.
No comments:
Post a Comment