The Thanksgiving Play

Wolf’s Head went on the road for this production of “The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse, in collaboration with MTU at the Rozsa Center in Houghton, Michigan.

"Thanksgiving Play" is about four white adults struggling to devise a politically correct elementary school production of the first Thanksgiving for Native American Heritage Month.

Cast:

  • Caden: Alastar Dimitrie

  • Alicia: Kaitlyn Frotton*

  • Jaxton: Adam Maslak

  • Logan: Jamie Weeder

  • Student/Ensemble: Melissa Neal

* Indicates a member of the Actor’s Equity Association

A note from the director, Jamie Weeder:

Dear Woke-White-Artist:

There will come a time in your life when you are commissioned to put on a culturally sensitive theatrical piece detailing the plight of someone that you’re not.

Maybe you already have been. I know I have. There’s a whole lotta life imitating art imitating life again goin’ on here.

I can attempt to detail out my hopes for you, dearest woke-white-artist, but if I’m being honest- it’s a bumpy road, this attempt at navigating an era of “Great Awokening”, and my own near-sightedness has never been more in focus. I’m holding the mirror to nature with my very white hand.

There’s sometimes a thin line between awareness and entitlement, between empathy and overhaul, between… responsibility and responsibility. Within the artist paradigm, we can endeavor to derail the normally-no-deviation-from-the-narrative approach to cultural and political thought with the truth: the conditional and inconstant truth.

… and you know what they (Oscar Wilde, an old dead white guy, ‘course) say about that… “If you are going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”

Art and literature, whether it be a play or a Tweet, has long been a battleground between the individual and the community. The truth is an ever-negotiation between what the individual thinks and feels and what the rest of the world thinks and feels; this negotiation is particularly amenable to a form that both elucidates the individual’s viewpoint and seeks to make it universal. The individual and the world, the world and the individual- they feed off and inform each other.

I’m a white woman so I thought of the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet realizes she has been utterly wrong about Mr. Darcy all along. It’s not just that she was wrong about the world beyond her narrow perception, but also about her own ability to discern the truth: “Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

And that, my darling woke-white-artist… is our Thanksgiving Play. We open this week, check us out and stick around for the panel discussion afterwards: That’s our charge now. Otherwise, good luck out there.