Through November 24
<b Lorna C. Hill Theatre/Ujima Theatre
Actors are fair game for playwrights and TV writers.
They take all of the stereotypes about performers and sling mud at the performing creative people, stressing claimed narcissism and racing after the latest social fads.
None of that is completely true, although it can be.
There’s a good example in Ujima Theatre’s amazing “The Thanksgiving Play.”
Larissa FastHorse’s play is about Thanksgiving, a sensitive issue in the Native community for the common mass of misconceptions of the relationship between settlers and the original residents of what are now Eastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod.
Historians have put out long lists of errors in the traditional stories of the claimed Thanksgiving celebration, you know, Indians in feathers and such while the Pilgrims were in their funny hats.
The play is about a Thanksgiving celebration in in an elementary school somewhere.
School arts director Logan (Elizabeth Oddy) wants a politically correct 45-minute play to let the kids hear the real story and she will make sure they do.
She has her boyfriend, Jaxon (Daniel Bills-Warman), with suitable politically correct ideas.
Caden (Connor Graham) is a local schoolteacher with long interests in Thanksgiving and a historically accurate play he’s been trying to peddle.
Logan needed an indigenous person to meet the terms of the grant she received and went on-line and found Alicia (Melinda Capeles) on a Hollywood database.
Only later does Logan discover she went by Alicia’s look on her photo without checking to see if she, actually, is indigenous.
She isn’t and that threatens the terms of her grant.
That’s where the story becomes ever more tangled and ever funnier as the four cavort around the stage trying to create a politically correct show about pilgrims and natives with a cast of four White people.
It’s also very pointed because so much of the discussion is so silly and, often, so dumb, even with a good heart.
This all obscures the basic point of the facts of what may or may not have happened on that day four centuries ago when the two sides may have sat down to celebrate the seasons and the abundance of the growing season.
What happened afterwards over the centuries of New England history isn’t part of the show although it’s part of the longer story.
FastHorse does a wondrous job combining the efforts of the four cast members with the story they are determined to tell, with no way that’s possible.
Get over to the Lorna C. Hill Theatre to see “The Thanksgiving Play,” a funny show about the illusions of American history, benefitting from four strong and comic performers, tightly controlled by director Rachel Jamison.
A.W.
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