Triggering Thanksgiving: contemporary satire plays Hermosa
by Garth Meyer
Can four white people put on a play about Thanksgiving and not get the teacher fired, whose grant is funding it? Should they even attempt it during Native American Heritage Month?
This is the situation in “The Thanksgiving Play,” on stage now at the Hermosa Beach Community Center’s Second Story Theater. The four-person, one-set production follows the group as they get to work — and soon find out one of them is not what the others had hoped.
“Am I too smart to be content?”
“I’m not smart. I’ve been tested.”
“Jaxton and I have a mutually respectful relationship.”
“So you’re not a couple?”
These are two exchanges in the story that centers on an overtly liberal drama teacher and her keeping-far left pace boyfriend, who is an actor. They bring in an elementary school teacher/amateur historian as a fact-checker, and hire a “Native American” actress over email.
She is an actress with a capital “A.” She doesn’t want to write anything, or think about anything, she just wants to act.
“Do I get paid more for empowerment?” she asks.
The historian wants the group to perform the play he’s already written. The liberal teacher wants to tell a story “honoring people’s space” and her boyfriend wants to honor that, too. As soon as they figure out what that is.
The four-actor ensemble is the strength of the production. Olga Konstantulakis is the defacto straight man with the unwelcome role of a disciplinarian trying to keep the cast from going off the rails.
Jeff Asch is the repressed school teacher who breaks out of his shell with abandon to sell his script to his castmates. Alex Pike is the insecure “A” type swinging from the egotistical to the desperate in trying to impress the director. Whitney Anderson brings a rubbery physicality to the tired role of a ditzy blonde. By the end of the play she has led the audience to a newly discovered understanding and appreciation of the stereotype.
“The Thanksgiving Play” picks up intrigue about halfway in, after a slow beginning. Once it starts to examine the perspectives of each character, it begins to color in and approach a chance to perhaps guide us through these times.
The play is essentially entertainment about issues you wonder whether or not are worth losing elections over.
If the journey brought us a little insight on how to address these matters, how to bring more harmony to American life today, it would be worth it. As it stands, the play’s clever ending leaves us still looking for that answer.
Perhaps that is a fundamental flaw, that “The Thanksgiving Play” essentially gives us a snapshot of what we know to be the case, but doesn’t offer enough of a solution.
“The Thanksgiving Play” is directed by Jack Messenger of the husband and wife team “Newstuff Productions.”
Written by Larissa Fasthorse, a Native American based in Santa Monica, the play opened in a small theater on Broadway in April, running until June when it was to open at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. But the SAG-AFTRA strike began and it was shut down.
“We had applied for the rights also, though we didn’t think we’d get them,” said Messenger.
With the strike, they did get them, and could hire actors on an equity waiver rule for small productions.
Other plays Newstuff has staged at Second Story include “Thoughts and Prayers,” “Distracted” and “Venus in Fur.” The company was formed in 2019, beginning with backyard garden performances during the pandemic.
“The Thanksgiving Play” runs Oct. 21, 22, 23, Oct. 27, 28, 29 and Nov. 3, 4, 5. Admission is $35 for adults and $20 for students. ER