The Thanksgiving Play

If you’re planning on The Holiday of Death as the title of our Thanksgiving Play, you’ll lose your job for sure. 

How in the world do we have a conversation about what we are celebrating as we move into the Thanksgiving holiday? For as long as humanity has had agricultural harvests, we have had the instinct to celebrate the bounty with a feast within our community. In ancient Egypt, this was in celebration of Min, the God of the Harvest and Fertility. In Nigeria the New Yam festival is celebrated by the Igbo people after the vital yam harvest. Samhain, a Gaelic festival, also celebrates the harvest as well as communing with our ancestors.  

For many in the U.S. just as it is with so many other cultures, our harvest festival Thanksgiving, too, is viewed as a holiday that brings family together, to feast, and to celebrate what we are grateful for. It’s a tradition that can be challenging to question, given that the contemporary context of giving thanks on this day in our country directly conflicts with the truth behind the myth of this holiday. In the quote above, the character Jaxton gives the play’s thesis early in the first scene. You’re here for a night of entertainment, and yes, we hope you laugh and enjoy yourself. Simultaneously, we’re having this conversation. That’s the beauty of Theatre, as well as the utility of satire.  

These characters believe, truly, that they are trying to do the right thing for the right reasons. In their earnest drive to grapple with the overall lack of diversity combined with the generational harm that has been perpetrated and minstrel played intentionally, whitewashing the genocide and conquest of the indigenous inhabitants of the United States. The interludes in this play are not mere caricatures of realistic educational models; they had been used in classrooms. If you look back at your childhood, think about how those lessons were perpetrated as the Macy’s red-face turkey and sweet potato-ization of Thanksgiving and how the sanitized story had been imprinted on you.