Veteran actor and comedian Craig Lauzon, known for his long-running work on CBC’s Royal Canadian Air Farce as well as various recent dramatic theatrical roles, returns to his comedic roots in Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play, a Pop-Up Theatre Canada production directed by Vinetta Strombergs and presented by Mirvish Productions. The play, which is making its Canadian premiere, is at once a biting satire and an introspective look at non-Indigenous educators creating a “fully devised educational play” about Thanksgiving to coincide with Native American Heritage Month.
Lauzon summarizes the premise in simple terms: “four well-meaning theatre people who are not Indigenous are trying to put together a Thanksgiving play for grade school kids that is unoffensive to Indigenous people. And they keep running into roadblocks because they are well-meaning, but don’t know much, and so it just snowballs from there.” Logan (portrayed by Rachel Cairns) is the high-school drama teacher who originates the project to make use of various cultural sensitivity grants that she has been awarded . . . and in the process, she hopes, save her job. Jaxton (Colin A. Doyle) is her politically correct yoga instructor boyfriend. Alicia (Jada Rifkin) is a professional actress hired by Logan to provide an Indigenous perspective. And Lauzon plays Caden, an earnest elementary school history teacher and lover of school theatre who has a deeply-invested take on Thanksgiving history.
Lauzon describes playwright FastHorse (who is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation) as “unrelenting” in skewering the mindsets and motivations of this motley group . . . who are being depicted on stage only because of the misguided attitudes she experienced within the theatrical community. “The reason she wrote this play was that she always wanted to get a play on Broadway, and was told that there either weren’t enough good Broadway-calibre Indigenous actors. Or there weren’t any available . . . really garbage reasons,” Lauzon shares. “So she writes this play from a very Indigenous point of view – but with no Indigenous characters – and boom, gets it on Broadway! And she’s the first [known] female Indigenous playwright to have a piece on Broadway.”
After its premiere in 2018, The Thanksgiving Play quickly became one of the most-produced plays in the United States, finally receiving that coveted Broadway premiere in 2023. When MIrvish announced plans to bring this cultural touchstone to Canada, “I hadn’t read it at that point, but I’d heard a lot about it”, Lauzon explains.”I was excited to be part of it, especially since it’s the first Canadian production.” And despite being a Canadian production, the play retains its American roots. “We haven’t done anything to change it… It’s the American Thanksgiving story.”
Returning to Comedy
In recent years, Lauzon has – by design – focused on dramatic roles in productions such as Bad Roads and Where the Blood Mixes. “After Air Farce ended, I was having trouble getting casting agents to see me in a certain way for roles,” Lauzon explains. “So I thought, well, if I’m going to be doing theatre, I want to do some dramatic parts and let them see me in that light.”
Mission accomplished. But with The Thanksgiving Play, he’s enjoying a return to his comedic roots: “I love comedy. I’m a student of comedy. I love all the old-timey stuff, like Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers…which really comes into this – especially the Marx Brothers – both slapstick and cerebral.” Lauzon’s character Caden offers him the opportunity to lean into the comedy. “He’s a history nerd, so he knows so much about all the things that nobody else has any clue about.” As a result, he veers wildly off-track, proposing wildly inappropriate depictions of pseudo-historical Thanksgiving celebrations from ancient Europe and Spain. “He finally gets there eventually. But he’s such a history nerd… I get to sort of lurk and be funny, just with eyes and expressions.”
Dying is easy; comedy is hard.
But though The Thanksgiving Play is very much a comedy, there is nothing simple or one-dimensional about it. “There’s a lot of layers to it. A lot of times…people think comedy is easy – especially this one. ‘It’s four people in a room. You know, once you know your lines, you should be good.’ Well, there’s a lot more to it than that.”
For starters, the play blends a variety of comedic styles, shifting from slapstick to sitcom to more meta moments – all of which require careful calibration to ensure the humour resonates and the play coheres. The challenge is “finding the right tone and hitting the right notes. It’s almost like doing a musical”, Lauzon explains. “But if you do something like Jesus Christ Superstar, the songs all have the same . . . underlying tone. But there are other musicals where all the songs are completely different, and that’s something you have to figure out: what tone do you want to hit, and how do you want to play it?”
Adding depth to this question is the fact that Lauzon is of mixed settler and Anishinabe heritage, but here plays a white character. So it’s striking when – in a guffaw-and cringe-inducing sequence towards the end of the play – he and Doyle’s character toss around supposedly decapitated heads made out of balls . . . while Lauzon leans into the sounds and actions that comprise the most fundamentally racist Indigenous stereotype. His character then pronounces that this representation “is true” and valuable because it “gets a Native American presence into our play”. During a post-show talkback, Lauzon explained that he (of all people) was the one who proposed to Strombergs that he embellish the scene with those sounds and actions. As with many moments in the play, the question we should ask once we’re done laughing is . . . “What prompted that laugh, in the first place?”
The answer is . . . it’s complicated. FastHorse’s script is built around this laugh-cringe-question sequence. She packs in rapid-fire jokes about actors, teachers, and writers – at the exact same time as she directly tackles the important themes that their work too often intersects, including: cultural insensitivity and misrepresentation; performative, rather than meaningful, activism; White privilege; historical accuracy and cultural memory; stereotypes of indigeneity; the erasure of Indigenous voices; and the complexities of political correctness; and educational representation.
The production also features a number of interstitial teacher videos (featuring actors Elley Ray Hennessy and Eric Woolfe), which – though over-the-top and cringeworthy– are based on actual lessons from teacher websites that FastHorse found online. Their juxtaposition with the antics of the on-stage educators – who are going to absurd extremes in their attempts not to be insensitive – suggests we need to be asking questions. As citizens, as parents and as real-life teachers who are perhaps as well meaning as their fictional counterparts on stage . . . are we in fact perpetuating stereotypes . . . without even realizing it? Through its satirical approach – that sequence of laugh-cringe-question –The Thanksgiving Play prods us to reflect on these issues, and on the broader implications of cultural representation and historical narratives in contemporary society.
Engaging with the Indigenous community
It’s needless to say that, despite its comedic exterior, The Thanksgiving Play is a serious critique of how non-Indigenous people attempt to engage with Indigenous issues. Lauzon stresses that the play’s characters clearly have good intentions . . . but the road to hell is paved with such: “You want to do the right thing, but you’re not doing it in the right way. That’s kind of what happens in this situation. They’re trying very hard to write this play to be inoffensive to the Indigenous community, but it’s all white people doing it. There’s no community engagement! And it’s not just for the Indigenous community. It’s any community. And I think that’s the major problem.”
And in Lauzon’s experience, this failure to engage the Indigenous community is a broader societal issue. He gives a real-world example of a friend’s wife, a teacher who is White, was asked to take over an Indigenous committee position temporarily. “She said, ‘but it’s a position about providing Indigenous perspective, and I’m not Indigenous. How can I give that perspective?’” He shakes his head, “there’s just a disconnect there.” And it’s the same disconnect that lies beneath the on-stage educators’ absurd final solution as to what they will – and won’t depict on stage in their culturally sensitive Thanksgiving play.
That ending is in many ways the ultimate laugh-cringe-question sequence, and one guaranteed to prompt active discussion among audience members. The educators have painted themselves into a corner. Without even seeing it, they end up erasing their entire purpose, as there is no Indigenous perspective, at the end. The ending is not just a retreat back into the stereotypes and elimination that the educators were trying to avoid, but also a side-eye glance at the casting factor that FastHorse sidestepped, in order to get her play on Broadway. And the question of what they – and we – should do? That’s on us to ponder.
The Thanksgiving Play treads on difficult terrain, but Lauzon is fully confident in its ability to entertain while provoking thought. “It’s a funny play… You don’t have to be Indigenous to like it. I’m sure that everybody’s going to know somebody that’s like this in the play.” He concludes our conversation with a practical starting point for avoiding these characters’ missteps: “The easy answer is engagement…talking to the right people, and not just trying to do it on your own.”
The Thanksgiving Play is on stage at the CAA Theatre until October 20, 2024. Reserve tickets on mirvish.com. A free post-show Q&A is available after every Tuesday and Thursday performance, providing an opportunity to ask questions and engage with the cast. Educational resources including a Teacher’s Guide for the play are also available.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2024
