‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Broadway Review: No Meat On These Bones
deadline.comEight years is pretty close to eternity when it comes to sell-by dates for topical humor, which might be one reason that the jokes in Larissa FastHorse’s Broadway comedy The Thanksgiving Play fall flat as an underbaked pie.
We can only surmise that when she first began writing this satire on Liberal guilt, woke sensitivities and Goopy indulgence back in 2015, words like “decoupling” and “soy milk” seemed like terrific punchlines.
Opening tonight at the Hayes Theater, The Thanksgiving Play, directed by Rachel Chavkin (Hadestown, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812) and starring D’Arcy Carden, Katie Finneran, Scott Foley, and Chris Sullivan – all of whom, director and cast, have done much better work on other stages – is the sort of easy-target satire that should by all rights have sophisticated New York audiences seeing their own foibles and smiling at their own political vulnerabilities.
So where exactly does this Thanksgiving go awry? Starts with the soup, ends with the nuts. Set in an elementary school classroom, the play follows four white adults – a drama teacher, her sometime-actor “yoga dude” boyfriend, a high school history instructor, and a Los Angeles actress, mistakenly thought to be of Native American descent – tasked with staging this year’s Thanksgiving play.
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