STAGE WEST: "The Thanksgiving Play" at New Village Arts Theatre

Erica Marie Weisz (left), AJ Knox, Samantha Ginn and Kenny Bordieri in "The Thanksgiving Play." Jason Sullivan / Dupla Photography

            When do good intentions become extremes?
           When they’re in “The Thanksgiving Play,” Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse’s spoof about a teacher, an historian, a street performer and an actress, all of them White, collaborating on a politically correct elementary-school play principally about Native Americans.
            If you took a “Saturday Night Live” skit and had the luxury of stretching it out from say four minutes to 90 you’d have “The Thanksgiving Play,” now onstage at New Village Arts Theatre in Carlsbad. This breakneck comedy stops at nothing when it comes to satirizing the collaborators’ overly sincere efforts to be culturally sensitive and, if you’ll excuse the buzzword, woke. For much of the going, the PC talk is overshadowed by wild onstage antics, from dressing up like turkeys to perform a Thanksgiving-themed take on “The 12 Days of Christmas” to (I swear I’m not making this up) using human-head props as bowling balls. Complete with leaking “blood.”
            With “The Thanksgiving Play,” FastHorse was the first female Native American playwright to have a work produced on Broadway. She undoubtedly is skeptical of the adopted campaigns in theaters and schools alike to more accurately reflect Native Americans like herself (as well as other marginalized groups). Who can blame her? Many who try seem to be either doing the bare minimum or, as is the case depicted in “The Thanksgiving Play,” going overboard to the point that the campaign is minimized or degraded.
             So FastHorse has something important to say.
            It makes for a thoughtful script to read, I imagine. As live theater, it’s hit and miss. That woke talk and all the chaotic hijinks are rather excessive, even in a one-act show.
            Looking at it from outside the audience point of view, “The Thanksgiving Play” has to be one of those shows that’s an absolute kick to be in. The actors get to exercise their physical comedy muscles, don some outrageous costumes (by Sandra Ruiz) and show off their onstage endurance and their improvisational skills. At New Village, director Daniel Jaquez ensures that his cast, led by one of the most gifted physical comedians in town, Samantha Ginn, gets loads of latitude.
            She’s complemented by Kenny Bordieri as her equally “aware” boyfriend/collaborator/street performer Jaxton (what a name!), AJ Knox as the stuffy historian Caden and Erica Marie Weisz as Alicia, the sexy L.A. actress who is mistakenly hired on a diversity-grant tab.
            It’s a fun if nearly out-of-control troupe.
            Just as the characters, led by Ginn’s schoolteacher Logan, make up their Thanksgiving play as they go, THIS “Thanksgiving Play” has the feel of something behind improvised, something being itself made up from moment to moment. With comedy, that doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t always work here. The laughs are big ones, but there could be more of them.
            I’ve long held that “message stories” told with comedy are more effective (and less ham-handed) than those told with drama. If FastHorse had written this as a serious play its characters’ ardent “sensitivity” might have been deadening. She knew what she was doing.
            “The Thanksgiving Play” runs through Nov. 3, giving you lots of time to think about its commentary before the actual holiday rolls around on the 28th. And if you miss it, San Diego State’s Department of Theatre, Television, and Film will stage its own “The Thanksgiving Play” beginning on Nov. 1.