Larissa Fasthorse: Last News

Ain’t No Mo, Cost of Living, Leopoldstadt, Good Night, Oscar, and now, The Thanksgiving Play (★★★★★), a dark and devilish satire by Larissa FastHorse.While gratitude should be a reflection and practice we incorporate into our daily lives, it is a virtue most closely associated with the fourth Thursday of November. That’s when we gather with friends and family, stuff ourselves silly with turkey, watch football, and fall asleep on the couch — all in the name of a long-perpetuated myth.FastHorse is having none of it.

Naveen Kumar Roasting nice white liberals is a time-honored theatrical pastime. Trim away the artifice of their smug posturing and they’re predictably stuffed with a medley of ignorance, hypocrisy and narcissism. The foursome assembled by the playwright Larissa FastHorse in “The Thanksgiving Play,” which opened tonight at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway, would seem especially primed to be skewered: Not only are they fluent in liberal-ese, but they’re also theater people. If the semantic gymnastics of hypersensitivity seem elliptical, try adding the inertia of devising a culturally appropriate children’s play that honors America’s genocidal roots. That’s what the high school drama teacher played by Katie Finneran is tasked with here, enlisting the help of her busking yogi boyfriend (Scott Foley); a frustrated playwright turned history teacher (Chris Sullivan of “This Is Us”); and a ditzy, beautiful, squint-and-she’s-ethnically-ambiguous actress (D’Arcy Carden of “The Good Place”). Cue a Christopher Guest-style comedy of amateur commitment to an unattainable goal and an ongoing bit.

Wilson Chapman editorLos Angeles’ Center Theater Group will host two world premieres, a West Coast bow, a U.S. launch and several classics and modern hits for its 2022-23 season.The initial programming lineup for the next season of the theater group, which operates the Ahmanson and the Mark Taper Forum, was announced on Thursday by managing director and CEO Meghan Pressman, producing director Douglas C. Baker and associate artistic directors Luis Alfaro, Lindsay Allbaugh, Tyrone Davis, Neel Keller and Kelley Kirkpatrick.The Taper’s season will open with “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” a one-woman play written by Jane Wagner that originally starred Lily Tomlin in 1991.