43 pages • 1 hour read
Larissa FasthorseThe Thanksgiving Play
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Recycled Water Bottle
Content Warning: This section discusses anti-Indigenous racism and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
The water bottle only appears in Scene 2, but it is a significant symbol of Performative Wokeness and White Privilege/Guilt, revealing both the way the characters are approaching this Thanksgiving play project and who they are as people. Jaxton gives the water bottle, which is a mason jar, to Logan as a gift for the first day of rehearsal. At first, Logan is confused and unimpressed by the gift, but Jaxton informs her that he bought it at the farmer’s market and that the glass is recycled shards from broken windows collected in housing projects. Logan lights up, suddenly ecstatic about the gift. Jaxton is the one who got Logan the job as the director of this piece, and the gift is a subtle way of reminding her of this (which works, as she thanks him for getting her the job). Jaxton also uses the jar as a way of describing the play, effectively marking his authority before she can and defining the piece on his own terms. He proclaims,
It’s symbolic of the way we’re going to create this play. We start with this pile of jagged facts and misguided governmental policies and historical stereotypes about race then turn all of that into something beautiful and dramatic and educational for the kids (11).
Notably, the stage directions at the beginning of the scene state that there is a dispenser in the classroom of whatever type of water is trendy (“alkaline, deionized, sewer; whatever is hippest” [10]). The implication is that Logan will drink her overpriced, fancily labeled tap water in her supposedly recycled mason jar, which is almost certainly just a regular, unrecycled mason jar. The scene establishes that both Logan and Jaxton are stereotypical “hipsters,” dressed in expensive, shabby chic, retro clothes and overly confident of their social awareness.
The idea of the (undoubtedly pricey) water bottle as recycled glass from broken windows in housing projects is a metaphor with multiple levels. First, it shows a fundamental misunderstanding and lack of empathy for those who are impoverished. People who live in housing projects are often stuck in substandard, poorly maintained homes in high-crime areas. A broken window likely means that the safety and security of someone’s home has been breached or, at the very least, that an empty, moldering home or business was vandalized; it also recalls the practice of “broken windows” policing and its devastating impact on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Logan and Jaxton recognize but exoticize these associations, co-opting the credibility of the experience of poverty and racism while calling themselves allies. The water bottle demonstrates that they are desperate to get a piece of oppression, even if they have to buy it. Furthermore, buying the water bottle at the farmer’s market implies that the money went to another upper-middle-class person like themselves. It’s a form of symbolic gentrification, which is the same process that Jaxton is proposing for the play. They see the broken pieces of Western treatment of Indigenous people and believe that they can turn it into something clean and pretty, but there is no polishing genocide.
Bloody Heads
One of the most surreal moments in the play is when Jaxton pulls two bloody severed prop heads with long black hair from a bag and drops them on the floor. The question as to where he found them in such a short time adds to the scene’s absurdity, which increases as Jaxton kicks one of the heads over to Caden and Alicia excitedly jumps in on the “game.” Notably, these two heads are the closest thing to an Indigenous presence in the characters’ rehearsal room. Jaxton and Caden defend their severed heads by asserting that they’re only sticking to historical fact, and they are correct that they are demonstrating the brutality of the violence against Indigenous people. Jaxton argues that they should show this gruesome level of historical violence as a warning to all the white children in the audience as to what they have been capable of doing throughout history. Logan points out that in this day and age, the children are fairly racially diverse, which means that punishing them with nightmares and emotional scars is extra inappropriate. In this sense, the heads symbolize the romanticization of violence against BIPOC people in art. Fasthorse suggests that this practice, ostensibly meant to educate, is in fact exploitative at best and an excuse for indulging in racist fantasies at worst.
The responses of the characters to the heads are also significant. Logan notes that she would be fired if she let them perform this macabre scene for children, but Jaxton takes this personally and calls her “a bitch.” His misogynistic reaction suggests that his white male fragility has been threatened by Logan exerting her authority over him. Playing a Pilgrim warrior who is returning from the slaughter of Indigenous people has seemingly struck a chord in terms of his masculinity, and he resents that Logan can take it away. Meanwhile, the cavalier way in which the characters treat the props suggests their indifference to actual Indigenous people. To Jaxton, Caden, and Alicia, the heads are objects to kick around. To Logan, the game is objectionable principally because it reminds her of Alicia’s strange family turkey bowling game; the bloody soccer game makes her gag as a vegan at the thought of raw turkey flesh, but this concern for animal welfare seems misplaced juxtaposed against the genocide of Indigenous Americans. Pointedly, this scene arose from the challenge of trying to tell some version of the Thanksgiving story with historical accuracy and without Indigenous actors. For the audience of Fasthorse’s play, the irreverence of kicking around the heads is a reminder that white colonizers did much worse to real human beings.
Empty Space
Logan discovers the empty space in the middle of the room after ordering the others to stop their scuffle over Caden’s insistence on reading his lines. She calls it a “perfectly equitable emptiness,” asserting, “We’ve been trying too hard. The empty space is completely, finally equal. That is our Thanksgiving play” (61). In one sense, nothingness is better than anything they are capable of doing. Logan acknowledges that as four white people, they cannot make a culturally sensitive play about Thanksgiving, and they therefore shouldn’t try. They shouldn’t be taking the lead or commanding spaces where artistic work is happening. They should be silencing themselves and making space for Indigenous voices, but that isn’t the same as replacing Indigenous voices with nothingness. An empty space is only equitable because it is empty. It does no harm, but it also does no good.
The satire intensifies as Jaxton begins to pontificate on the profundity of the emptiness. Rather than a decision not to create a play that they shouldn’t create, Jaxton speaks about the space as an incredible approach to activism. When Alicia asks if she’ll still get paid for rehearsals, Logan confirms that she will. This suggests that Logan fully intends to keep the grants, which will require some delicate footwork to justify using nothingness as a performance. However, the grant boards that awarded money to a white woman for the creation of a Thanksgiving play will most likely be willing to accept said fancy footwork because the goal of all involved seems to be to further their personal agendas while patting themselves on the back. Not only do they credit themselves for doing something positive, but they set themselves up to feel good about doing nothing in the future. In the final moments of the play, the significant action that takes place is the coupling and recoupling of four actors. Their personal goals have been at the forefront throughout the play, and therefore they are the focus in the end. It’s not a play about four people creating activist theater; it’s a play about four people going on personal journeys while they are trying to create a piece of theater.
