There’s an important first marked by “The Thanksgiving Play” when it arrives as the second show of Moonbox Productions’ 2024-2025 season: It’s the first major production of the play led by a Native American director.
The play, a satire by Larissa FastHorse, centers around a group of four well-intentioned but terminally woke performers who get together to create a new take on the classic Thanksgiving pageant. Good intentions collide with absurd assumptions as the group struggles to reimagine America’s history. The play ran on Broadway in 2023, making FastHorse the first Native woman playwright to have a work on Broadway.
Director Tara Moses described herself as “deeply embedded” in the national Native theater community. She was part of the development process for a staging of “Sovereignty” by Mary Kathryn Nagle at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2017, the first time a major regional theater produced a Native work.
Now, she’ll be the first Native director to lead a production of “The Thanksgiving Play.” And she’s pioneering another first for the Moonbox production. “Larissa wrote in the character description that she would love to have the show be cast with white-presenting Native actors or light-skinned people of color, but that also hasn’t really happened before,” Moses said. “I said to Moonbox I would direct it if we can cast it with Native actors and actors of color, and they said, absolutely, let’s do it.”
The four-person cast includes Marisa Diamond as Alicia, Jasmine Goodspeed as Logan, Ohad Ashkenazi as Caden and Johnny Gordon as Jaxton.
Moses is also ratcheting up the satire, and redesigning depictions of the characters in the play.
“I have very big ideas for what it means to have four people of color in these roles,” Moses said.
As it’s written, “The Thanksgiving Play” includes a reenactment of a massacre of Native people, and it’s meant to be done very realistically, an experience that Moses, in the audience, called “traumatizing.”
“Larissa is brilliant, and she did this because so many people are desensitized to violence against Native people; it does what it needs to do for non-Native audience members, but for me, it was extremely triggering,” Moses said.
In her version at Moonbox, there won’t be depictions of murder – Moses promised “no Native will be traumatized” – and she will convey the message of that scene through other methods.
For each of its plays, Moonbox Productions partners with a local nonprofit whose mission aligns with a central theme or idea from the show. For “The Thanksgiving Play,” it has partnered with the North American Indian Center of Boston, established in 1969 as the Boston Indian Council to serve as the hub of Indigenous social and civil rights activities in Boston and reorganized in 1991 to provide a wide range of cultural, social, educational and professional services to Indigenous peoples in Massachusetts.
“What I love about Naicob is that even though they are very much centered on civil rights and other advocacy efforts, it’s a place for community to gather and for people to just exist and be in relationship with one another,” Moses said.
Each performance of “The Thanksgiving Play” will be followed by community conversations led by Moonbox staff members. Moses described the conversations as a kind of “epilogue” to the play.
“The idea is we’ve just gone through an experience together, let’s talk about what it’s bringing up for folks,” Moses said. “And let’s talk about what this means in the context of the Cambridge and Boston area, which has a deep history of settler colonialism. Let’s disrupt some of those narratives too.”
“The Thanksgiving Play” is at Arrow Street Arts, 2 Arrow St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, from Nov. 21 to Dec. 15. Tickets are online for $45. Moonbox has a pick-your-price option that lets audience members pay what they wish for tickets. Card to Culture tickets are available for EBT, WIC and ConnectorCare cardholders.
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