"The Thanksgiving Play" by Larissa Fasthorse
“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth,” from 1914, by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe.
Thanksgiving Myths, Lies, and Evidence
Most people know that the Thanksgiving story recited in the songs, plays, and textbooks across America is fictionalized—a reduced, fairy-tale version of the history of one group of people catastrophically conquering another.
The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to explore and exploit North America—they weren’t even the first colonial settlement. They weren’t seeking religious freedom by setting sail on the Mayflower, and they certainly had a much more complex, destructive relationship with the indigenous tribes of the Wampanoag Confederacy than the story lets on.
The people who settled in New England in the early 1600s called themselves Saints or Separatists. They left England for Holland around the time of the Reformation when the Church of England broke away from Catholicism. The decision to leave Holland for the “new world” was multi-faceted. They found the Dutch city too cosmopolitan for their pious beliefs and, moreover, colonizing was a promising way for the community to make money. Europeans had been in and out of the Americas for a century—they knew there was an opportunity there from European entrepreneurs that had already crossed the Atlantic.
There is evidence that some of the cooperation at the center of the Thanksgiving myth is rooted in truth: the Separatists colony survival was due in part to their raiding of Wampanoag stores and the occupation of their fields, and to the translation and expertise of Squanto—who, among other lessons, tried to teach the invaders to bathe more frequently.
A major missing piece of the story about the early years of European colonization is biological. Across the Americas, native populations were much healthier than Europeans, who generally lived in much denser environments and had less developed hygiene habits. The arrival of Europeans brought disease—historians suspect it was bubonic plague, viral hepatitis, smallpox, chickenpox, or influenza— that incited a wave of illness and death that dwarfs the Black Death and every other plague known to history. Between 1617 and 1620, just before the Pilgrims arrived, the plague was carried by English and French fisherman and wiped out 90 to 96 percent of the people living in coastal New England. Similar patterns of destruction occurred throughout the Americas as colonists made contact with native people. At the time, evidence suggests the colonists took this Biblical-level devastation as a sign that God was on their side.
So why the lies? It’s complicated, but it isn’t: history itself is a story pieced together by the victors and survivors. But Thanksgiving is about more than history; it’s an origin story, a foundational myth that supports a shared identity of what America is and what it means to be American. Seeking religious freedom and designing a pre-Constitutional community agreement is a simpler, rosier mythology than the tales of a group of bombastic, conservative families using religion as a cover for the pursuit of wealth—though that sounds fairly American to me.
I am indebted to James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me for much of the information in this section. It’s a fascinating read that I highly recommend.
From the Dramaturg
This play is challenging for me, by which I mean, I find it to be an effective satire. I have a lot in common with the folks we meet in this play: I hear myself when Logan uses oh-so-woke “collaborative” language to control the room; I see myself whenever Jaxton throws himself into a sporty asana; I hear my own quivering excitement in Caden’s gleeful recitation of history and utter belief in the power of theatre.
I try to be a better, truer, ally than the folks in this play, but I know sometimes the performative trappings of activism can eclipse, you know, the active part. I didn’t knit a pink pussy hat, but probably only because someone on Twitter told me not to.
The Thanksgiving Play is about a lot of things—theatre, public school, history, Thanksgiving—but the topic I keep coming back to is this idea of what Patricia Mitchell, who interviewed Larissa Fasthorse in 2016, called “sensitivity-born paralysis.” No doubt our words matter a great deal, and getting our language and actions right is important, but not at the expense of action. What’s a well-meaning ally to do?, the interviewer asks. “Take some responsibility for your own ignorance and get educated,” Fasthorse replies. “Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s through mistakes that we learn.”
I’m leaving my work on this play committed to doing that. To make my anti-racist, progressive work bold and vocal, and to welcome critique. The biggest ask is of the folks who can call out my mistakes—the second biggest ask is of my ego, to get out of the way so we can get to work.
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In addition to the shortcomings of a certain kind of contemporary allyship, The Thanksgiving Play asks us to consider historiography, or basically, how history gets made. I’d be surprised if anyone in our audience enters the theatre completely unaware that the popular Thanksgiving story is (spoiler alert) basically fiction, but the play offers lessons both direct and metaphorical about how that myth got made.
Any retelling of history, be it in a scholarly book or a 45-minute elementary school play, is going to require a reduction. The process by which life becomes history includes an infinite series of editorial choices that necessarily serve a greater goal. In the case of the play being devised in The Thanksgiving Play, the super-goal is to meet a list of requirements and restraints. In the bigger scheme of American history and the Thanksgiving mythology, threads of fact have been lifted, frayed, and amended to serve different purposes in the intervening centuries. It’s hard to know if there was even a particular meal that inspired the holiday because, despite the origin story we share with schoolchildren, Thanksgiving as we know it now was declared by Abraham Lincoln as a peace-keeping and healing maneuver following the Civil War.
The Thanksgiving myth serves as a prelude to a greater American mythology. It sets the stage for a national fairy tale of a white, democratic, God-blessed inevitability. The myth-making machinery of culture—which encompasses history, entertainment, school, and religion, among others—elevates what serves those in power, and erases what (and who) doesn’t.
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Something you need to know about this play is that it’s not Larissa Fasthorse’s first play, or even her first really good play. It does, however, mark the first time that Fasthorse—that any Indigenous female-identifying playwright, for that matter—has ever been bestowed with the following honor: The Thanksgiving Play is one of the Top 10 Most-Produced Plays this season, according to a study conducted by the Theatre Communications Group.
All over the country, audiences are sitting down in theatres like this one to watch The Thanksgiving Play. I think it’s a really good play, and I’m so glad you here to see it. But I also think it’s important to take note of the balance of Larissa Fasthorse’s work that we aren’t doing: the ones with mostly Indigenous actors.
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Welcome to The Thanksgiving Play. If you’re a white American like me, I hope during and after this play, you laugh, reflect, and grow. People of color and Native people, you can do whatever you want. I hope you laugh, too. I’m sorry we’re like this.
— Sara Keats, dramaturg and assistant director
Yes, and Satire
In an interview with The Interval, Larissa Fasthorse said of The Thanksgiving Play: “It’s a satire but there’s a comedy within the satire.” For director Kelly Kitchens and the rest of our creative team, that’s been a guiding insight.
“The comedy is the sugar to make the medicine go down,” Fasthorse goes on to say in the interview. “We get to all laugh at ourselves in this show [...] We get to have fun and enjoy being together and having that communal experience of theatre, but at the same time it doesn’t let us off the hook.”
Satire is a genre and device in literature and art that underscores and mocks people or institutions to elicit shame. Unlike teasing, which has a rich theatrical tradition of its own, satire is subversive. Playwright Dario Fo theorized that whereas teasing is reactionary and humanizes the powerful, satire is active and punches up. Contemporary examples of satire include the comic “news” on The Onion and The Daily Show, both of which use parody of their respective news formats to deliver satirical takes on current events and culture.
Parody is a technique of satire that relies on mimicking specific tropes of a genre or style—The Colbert Report was a parody of a conservative cable news show, and most SNL archetypes ( with the exception of specific impressions) are parodies as well. Farce, on the other hand, is an amped-up version of satire: bold, unsubtle, and broad—think Moliere or the movie Clue. Also in the mix is irony, a form of humor that relies on the stark contrast between fiction and reality—like the entire premise of the Disney movie Ratatouille. You wouldn’t think a rat in your actual kitchen was very funny, would you?
Satire in and of itself isn’t funny, but the irony, parody, and farce that go hand-in-hand with it coat it in a palatable layer— Fasthorse’s sugar to make the medicine go down. Without the satire at the center of these tactics, the play would still be funny, but much less subversive—and way less cunning.
In “Peeling the Onion: Satire and the Complexity of Audience Response,” Jane Fife writes, “The association of comedy and irony with amusement may make it hard for some to see satire as
having a serious message rather than being an escape from the serious.” In The Thanksgiving Play, Fasthorse serves up both. The dysfunction and utter paralysis of well-meaning, yoga-appropriating, performatively-woke allies is a real problem with serious consequences, but if we’ve done our job, even the most terrifying moments of the play will make you laugh.
Fasthorse’s script presents a unique challenge for actors. “[It’s] harder is for the performers,” she told The Interval, “because comedy feels good and satire is hard, being the butt of the joke is hard. So there’s a tendency in the portrayal to really want to amp up the comedy at the sacrifice of the satire.” We’ve done our best to honor both.
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If this play encourages you to support Native communities locally, make a material gift to Real Rent Duwamish (https://www.realrentduwamish.org/). If you’re a white person interesting in doing anti-racist work in our community, learn more about the Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites (https://www.carw.org/).