Review | ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ at the New Vic in Downtown Santa Barbara

In The Thanksgiving Play, a high school drama teacher (Devin Sidell), her busking boyfriend (Adam Hagenbuch), an aspiring playwright (Will Block), and an actress (Ashley Platz) are tasked with devising an original piece of educational theater for elementary-school students. The topic is “Thanksgiving,” which raises the hackles of the progressive 20-something creatives. They vow to inject their fashionably enlightened ideas into the conversation about the holiday’s legacy by amplifying native voices and representing native experiences. Regrettably, no one on the project is of native ancestry, and they struggle to present the subject with the cultural sensitivity they feel it deserves.

Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of this comedic satire by Larissa FastHorse (directed by Brian McDonald) spins these characters around the hamster wheel of circular logic and social overcompensation at brutal speed. It’s a clever concept for delivering a contemporary, social-equality-based view of Thanksgiving, but the characters are so extravagantly hyperbolic that “hilariously cringey” often slips into off-putting absurdity. The Thanksgiving Play aims for biting social commentary but lands, instead, in a quagmire of sketch-comedy material about insufferable wokeness.

The show does deliver several wicked moments of force and clarity, but ultimately the stakes of this story are impossible (these four will never successfully create this commission) and their personalities lean toward intolerable. However, sub-level themes relating to the ineptitude of terrified-to-offend artists are intriguing. The play calls out the inefficacy of artists who are “woke” to the point of paralyzing fear that impedes their ability to produce meaningful work. Most importantly, the greater purpose of the show (recognizing the blood-soaked erasure of native culture through colonization and the whitewashing of American history) is never lost in the chaos — as represented in the play’s final, silent visual: a blood-spattered circle of empty stage in spotlight. 

The Thanksgiving Play runs at the New Vic Theatre through October 22. See etcsb.org/production/the-thanksgiving-play/ for more information and tickets.