The piece raises an occasional chuckle, but it goes into the bin of the rarely funny genre of Well-Intentioned People Getting It Wrong. There are the easy jokes about pronouns; a pedant stickles about the difference between literally and figuratively to set up another limp joke. There is the outsider who is not what everyone else takes her to be: a Waiting for Guffman trope telegraphed like it was on a fiber optic cable. The clash between art and commercial viability for women is better executed in Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business.
Shea-Mikal Green as Logan, the director of the no-budget “devised piece” about the American Thanksgiving, does manage to inject some manic energy into this wobbly vehicle.
- The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, directed by Suzanne Beal, Maryland Ensemble Theatre, Frederick, Md.