Arts & Culture

What: The Thanksgiving Play
Where: CAA Theatre, until 651 Yonge St.
When: Now, until Sun., Oct. 20
Highlight: Anahita Dehbonehie’s detailed classroom set
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should go: The four-person cast of local talent does precise character work.

A GRID OF cellphone cubbies hanging on a classroom wall connects Pop-Up Theatre Canada’s new off-Mirvish production of Larissa FastHorse’s 2018 satire The Thanksgiving Play to present-day Ontario, where a provincewide phone ban just went into effect in schools.

That detail of Vinetta Strombergs’s 90-minute production aside, it’s a little hard to believe the play was updated as recently as 2023 when it played on Broadway to positive reviews. While the four-person cast of local actors fights gallantly to remain afloat, the script’s satire rings with a quaint hollowness — it nibbles more than bites.

When over-ambitious drama teacher Logan (Rachel Cairns) receives a grant to put on an educational Thanksgiving play for Native American Heritage Month, she decides to spend it on Alicia (Jada Rifkin), a seemingly Indigenous actor from Los Angeles. After rounding out the cast with Caden (Craig Lauzon), a bearded historical consultant, as well as Jaxton (Colin Doyle), her scruffy street performer boyfriend, Logan proposes the team devise the 45-minute piece as a collective. But, as she volleys questions at the actors, it soon becomes clear Alicia isn’t Indigenous at all, having even worn a costume in her headshot.

For Logan and Jaxton, who consider themselves social activists, this news mortifies. How can they do a play about Indigenous people with no Indigenous actors? Their convoluted attempts to answer that question — in a way that won’t get them cancelled by the hundreds of parents already calling for Logan’s firing — propel the show’s action.

I don’t find The Thanksgiving Play particularly sharp, politically. Although there’s pertinence to the questions it raises about whom the theatre is really for, these larger themes aren’t enough to power it through its array of limp digs at veganism. Video co-ordinator Caitlin Farley projects parodies of anti-Indigenous kindergarten songs on the back wall of Anahita Dehbonehie’s detailed classroom set between scenes, perhaps indicating the production is trying to make a meal of wading into treacherous waters. That’s all great and amusing at first — but I’d offer that once a show has entered said waters, it must do more than splash about.

The actors’ precise character work generates a web of shifting energies. Logan’s neuroticism knocks up against Alicia’s disarming tranquillity while the sweet shyness of Caden counterpoints the candour of the forthright Jaxton. If this was more of a character piece, this clearcut band of personalities might be able to put wind in the production’s sails. Alas, tertiary makeover plotline aside, all the script really has are jokes — and, at least on opening night, they didn’t connect.