Why Mirvish’s ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ is all the more resonant in light of the TDSB’s Grassy Narrows rally scandal

There’s no question that Mirvish purposefully programmed Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” just in time for Canadian Thanksgiving, so we can chow down on this social-political satire alongside our stuffing and roast turkeys. 
What Mirvish could not plan for, however, was that this Pop-Up Theatre Canada production would arrive in the wake of a scandal tearing apart the Toronto District School Board. I’m referring, of course, to the ongoing controversy surrounding students from some 15 TDSB schools who attended a rally in support of Indigenous rights, which also attracted pro-Palestinian protesters and featured their controversial chants.
Critics charged that teachers shouldn’t have brought their students to the event. Others defended the rally, saying their children were never threatened. The TDSB subsequently apologized and, now, Ontario’s education minister has ordered a provincial investigation. 
It’s not difficult to draw parallels between this scandal and FastHorse’s provocative comedy. Her play, after all, is about a group of educators whose good intentions blow up in their faces. 
The consequence of this inadvertent juxtaposition — of “The Thanksgiving Play,” which opened Wednesday at the CAA Theatre, and the TDSB controversy — is that these recent events help contextualize and ground FastHorse’s somewhat slight satire, which occasionally feels like an overdrawn sketch. And though comedy can be a crude medium, “The Thanksgiving Play” is proof how we can use humour to explore the thorniest and most complex issues. 
At first, it feels like FastHorse is mocking her characters. The Native American playwright, from the Sicangu Lakota Nation, has written them so broadly that it’s impossible not to laugh at these stock stereotypes. 
Logan (Rachel Cairns) is a high school drama teacher and a staunch vegan. Her boyfriend, Jaxon (Colin A. Doyle), is an actor, yoga practitioner and a hypocritical cheese-loving “vegan ally.” 
When Logan is tasked with developing and directing an educational Thanksgiving play for school kids, she enlists the help of Caden (Craig Lauzon), an overzealous American history teacher, and Alicia (Jada Rifkin), a dim-witted actor from L.A. looking for a job. 
They attempt to centre Indigenous voices in their Thanksgiving retelling. (After all, Logan received funds for the project from the Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant and must fulfil the requirements of the award.) But those attempts prove ill-fated when they discover — after an initial misunderstanding — that none of them are in fact Native American.
What follows is a comedy of errors as the quartet stumble through their ambitious endeavour, repeatedly tripping over the booby traps of political correctness. 
FastHorse’s setup initially provides enough fuel for her satire. Cairns, Doyle, Lauzon and Rifkin possess solid chemistry — the latter, in particular, delivers a riotous performance loaded with daft physical comedy. 
But by the middle of the 100-minute play, the humour begins to sag. The primary issue here is that FastHorse’s story rarely feels more than an overextended “Saturday Night Live” sketch. 
There’s not much director Vinetta Strombergs can do — or does — to liven the action. It’s all statically set in a drama classroom (designed with impeccable detail by Anahita Dehbonehie) over the course of a single rehearsal, as the four characters bicker, debate and improvise their way through the development of their children’s play. 
But just as you think FastHorse’s 2018 drama can’t regain its momentum, “The Thanksgiving Play” snaps back into focus. It’s then, during an eleventh-hour twist in those closing minutes of the play, that the purpose of this comedy becomes clear. 
FastHorse is not satirizing the out-of-touch educators at the centre of her play as much as the culture of fear that grips them. We are disengaging from the issues that matter most, the playwright seems to suggest, because we don’t even know how to engage with them in the first place and fear the potential repercussions of our missteps.
It’s an idea that’s especially resonant now amid the ongoing TDSB controversy, as we continue to reckon with how best to engage with our most complex, contemporary issues. And it’s a lesson that we’d all be better off by heeding.