‘Thanksgiving Play’ brings satirical comedy to Theatre Cedar Rapids studio stage

CEDAR RAPIDS — Will “The Thanksgiving Play” make Theatre Cedar Rapids’ predominantly white audiences squirm?

“I hope so. That’s the point of the play,” director Patrick Du Laney of Iowa City told The Gazette.

While audiences in TCR’s expansive auditorium will be oohing and aahing through “Beauty and the Beast,” those seated in the intimate, lower-level Grandon Studio will be cringing, gasping and laughing as two “actors” and two “teachers” try to devise a politically correct telling of the first Thanksgiving, for an elementary school audience.

However, nothing is politically correct as the action unfolds through Dec. 1.

“I think the big idea of the play is, ‘White people, stop making it about you.’ That’s where the play lives,” Du Laney said. “It’s a four-hander, but it’s primarily these two characters who are so earnest and want to do right so hard that they push it into absurdity. And the results of their earnestness is where a lot of the humor of the play derives.”

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About the playwright

The script is a full-on satirical comedy, written by Larissa Fasthorse from the Sicangu Lakota Nation, who grew up in South Dakota and now lives in Santa Monica, Calif.

As stated on her website, her “radical inclusion process with Indigenous tribes” has garnered her prestigious awards and funding streams, and she has developed plays for the Yale Rep, the Kennedy Center, the Guthrie and more. Her online biography notes that her company, Indigenous Direction, is “redefining Indigenous art representation and education in America.”

If you go

What: “The Thanksgiving Play,” by Larissa Fasthorse

Where: Grandon Studio, lower level at Theatre Cedar Rapids, 102 Third, St. SE, Cedar Rapids

When: Through Dec. 1, 2024; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday; 2:30 p.m. Sunday; no performance on Thanksgiving Day

Tickets: General admission; $37 adults; $25 students and youths; TCR Box Office, (319) 366-8591 or theatrecr.org/event/the-thanksgiving-play/2024-11-21/

Fasthorse began writing “The Thanksgiving Play in 2015, staged it and workshopped it in various cities, including an off-Broadway run in New York City in 2018. The following year, it became one of the most-produced regional shows in the 2019-2020 season.

In 2023, it made a giant leap, becoming the first play by a Native American female playwright to land on Broadway.

“She’s just so smart,” said TCR cast member Hannah Brewer of Cedar Rapids. “This script is so smart.”

“Yes,” added actor Cindy Shadrick of Cedar Rapids. “When you’re trying to memorize lines, you try to make sure you memorize it perfectly. I always try to do with all scripts, but in this script specifically, every line is important, because she picked every word.

“There’s no throw away lines in this show. So even if the line is ‘good’ or ‘OK’ or ‘ummm,’ she meant that purposefully,” Shadrick said. “Every line has a purpose, so don’t miss one, because everything she wrote was perfect. So it's important to — not that we don’t drop a line — but it is important to try to get that, because she was so thoughtful about every single line she wrote.”

The characters

The play begins with Logan (Brewer), a high school drama director who is trying to save her job by devising a kid-friendly, culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play from scratch. However, as a vegan, any mention of turkeys-as-entrees nauseates her.

For the project, she brings along her life partner, Jaxton (Ryan Shellady), a yoga instructor and wannabe actor. They make it very clear that their relationship happens at home, not in their workspace and head space.

They’re joined by Caden (James McIntyre), an earnest history teacher intent on taking deep dives into the authenticity of the first Thanksgiving meal between the European “separatists” — not “pilgrims” — and the Indigenous people they meet.

And Logan has won a grant to bring in a Native American professional actress from Los Angeles, but Alicia (Shadrick) turns out to be rather flaky and isn’t interested in “devising” a play. She wants to read words — and twirl her hair.

A fifth person — Teacher (Michele Payne Hinz) — speaks to the audience in an authoritative tone, taking care of the preshow business. She also introduces a couple of elementary school Thanksgiving songs that Shadrick, a real-life vocal instructor, said still exist on classroom education websites — but sound so wrong.

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The tricky part is actually playing satire, a convention not often used on stage.

“The purpose of satire is speak truth to power, and you have to walk that razor’s edge of allowing audience members to relax into the story that they are being skewered in,” said Du Laney, who first encountered the show at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, where he teaches.

“I’ve worked with Patrick Du Laney for, I think 20 shows now, and he always really pushes me to explore new areas that I can act in,” said Shellady of North Liberty. “Every show he directs me in is something a little different, and satire is tricky because it has to come from a place of earnestness.

“This isn’t slapstick body comedy or mistaken identity, like a farce,” he noted. “These are real people, and we need the audience to really identify with them and see themselves on stage, for them to really understand that we’re kind of making fun of them a little bit. So it was a challenge to stay in that earnestness and take it to a very absurd place.”

“I think, for me, at least the key was Patrick saying it’s not an ‘SNL’ sketch,” Brewer said. “These are earnest people, and they really want what’s best. They really are trying their hardest. Their hearts are in the right places. It’s just their hearts are a little askew, possibly.

“And for me, the key, I think, is being able to laugh at yourself a little bit and understand that we’re poking fun at all of us,” Brewer said. “ … That helps make it more palatable and accessible, and not offensive.”

Doing her own “nerd poses” has helped Brewer capture her character and all of Logan’s “quirkiness.”

“She so badly wants to be taken seriously as an artist,” Brewer said, adding that Logan is “trying so hard, but maybe too hard” to find her place in the theatrical world.

Shadrick, who typically plays more in the musical theater realm, is having a blast playing the ditzy L.A. actress, Alicia.

“She’s such the opposite of me,” Shadrick said. “I don’t think she has an internal monologue, and all Cindy does is think. But I think that Alicia is the smartest one in the room. I think she is the most self-aware one in the room. She has nothing to hide, she has nothing to gain, she has nothing to lose. She’s just there to do the job, and she is there to act, and she doesn’t learn anything in the end. …

“She's very, ‘This is who I am, and you’re not going to change me. I don’t need to change because I’m exactly the way I should be.’ So I do think that she's the smartest.”

Shadrick also is grateful Du Laney never said “no” to any little bits she thought Alicia might do with the props in the colorful elementary classroom where the action takes place.

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Learning curve

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a smoother rehearsal process,” Du Laney said, adding that early on, after the actors were dismissed from rehearsal, he would turn to stage manager Kelly Shriver to make sure he wasn’t imaging how well it was going.

“I just never had four actors get it so quickly,” he said, “ … so that was a real treat to work on. And it is very clear that these four actors have a real affection and belief in the show and what it’s trying to accomplish. They took the play away from me fairly quickly, which is what’s supposed to happen.

“There’s a lot of character stuff going on that has some rich interiority that I didn’t put there. They just did it.”

With the awareness the playwright intends to bring to the audiences, what lessons have the actors and directors learned along the way?

“From a director’s standpoint, relax and trust the process when you know it’s working,” Du Laney said. “And from the standpoint of what the play is trying to accomplish, is shut up and listen.”

“I think it’s interesting, because specifically for Alicia, she is an actor. I am an actor,” Shadrick said. “I’m playing exactly what I do. We’re all actually doing the things that we do. We are exactly who’s on this stage, just pulling these characters in. … We are artists. This is what we do. We do try to put on a play and tell a story, and that’s exactly what these people are doing. So it’s Meta.”

“Honestly, I really relate to Logan in a lot of ways,” Brewer said, including the grant writing, which is part of Brewer’s duties as TCR’s development director. “Very triggering,” she said with a laugh. “But (we) really can’t take ourselves too seriously, and sometimes the only way to get through the hard stuff is to is to laugh and to tell yourself, ‘I am doing the best that I can.’ …

“It’s not often you get a cast you get to trust so well and so quickly and so thoroughly,” she said, knowing that if she were to mess up onstage, “these lovely people would be getting me out of it.”

“I do think that a show like this is so important,” Shellady added, “not just because we need to make fun of ourselves, but because we do live in a world that is a challenge right now, and we have had this incredible opportunity to just make people laugh.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com