BUZZ
ANALYSIS: Yet theater department does land acknowledgments, offers free tickets to Natives
A University of Portland theater featured Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” this past week, a supposedly “witty” take on white people’s social justice performativity.
According to The Beacon, the performance is set in Portland, Oregon, itself (one of the most progressive cities in the country) and features “four well-meaning white characters” who attempt to make “a woke but not-too-woke Thanksgiving play for children.”
Director Phillip Guevara, a U. Portland adjunct who teaches “movement,” said the play is about “white people grappling with genocide … erasure, white supremacy, misogyny” and “pretty much what you would expect when you hear, ‘Well-meaning white people trying their best to put on a Thanksgiving play.’”
Professor Andy Christensen (pictured), who according to his faculty page is a “fiercely curious artist-educator who specializes in emergent forms of immersive and site-informed theatre that explore the intersection of place and time,” said the performance “poke[s] fun at white people’s performative sense of social justice” that ultimately ends up causing harm.
“[S]ometimes it is harder to navigate than overt white supremacy because it’s still about trying to make sure that people can see themselves as good white people, rather than about honestly questioning the notion [of] whether you can be a good white person in a system of white supremacy,” Christensen said.
Specific examples of this performativity — anti-racist bookclubs, placards “denouncing racial prejudice,” and “listicles of favorite Black-owned restaurants” — come via a linked article by Kay Kingsman, a seemingly looking-for-any-excuse-to-be-offended black woman.
The article also notes Native American land acknowledgments … which, ironically enough, are regularly used by the university’s theater department as part of its policy of “representing and uplifting marginalized groups.”
More recently, in order “to give back to groups subject to historical injustices,” the department also began offering free play tickets to Native Americans.
Professor Christensen conceded the irony, saying “So you acknowledge the land is stolen, you know it’s stolen, and then you don’t restore it or do anything about that theft,” but added it’s “a massive and complex social, cultural and national issue that we, at the university theater department, do not have the resources or scope to solve.”
In 2019, “The Thanksgiving Play” creator FastHorse was awarded the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award. In her acceptance speech, she said “many of the original people of this continent do not have” the same rights as even their fellow Native Americans.
“They are fighting to have a federal classification of extinct removed so that they can legally be free to exist,” she said. “I will say that again: The government has told them that legally these people do not exist.”
MORE: Stanford theater group reimagines ‘Julius Caesar’ with ‘female-identifying’ actors
