The Thanksgiving Play Program Notes

(This is the dramaturge that I wrote for the program)

It’s a story many of us heard growing up and it’s a story that we continue to tell our children to this day: The pilgrims, starving on unfamiliar shores, are aided by benevolent indigenous people who share their bounty and teach them how to properly live off the land. Turkey is broiled, potatoes are mashed, and everyone ends up having a respectful argument about politics and football.  

Only that’s not how it really happened, is it?  

The twenty-first century is, generally speaking, turning out to be a bit more enlightened than the last. Those that look forward to the future first reflect on the past to see what worked, what didn’t, and how we can do things better next time. The most important driver of this change is the world’s growing focus on voices that were belittled and ignored previously in our collective history, voices that polish our understanding to a more complete, if overall less shiny, sheen. The Thanksgiving story that we all know might have some truth to it, but whatever truths it has are delivered via monologue rather than a discussion. There is, after all, another half to the conversation.  

Written by Larissa FastHorse, a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe, The Thanksgiving Play chronicles the story of four well-meaning theater enthusiasts who attempt to tell the most historically accurate and culturally sensitive story of the First Feast possible, but quickly find that there is one significant problem: They are all very, very white. With jobs and dreams on the line they have no choice but to forge ahead, but questions remain: How does one tell the story of the first Thanksgiving without Native representation and voices? Should the actual history of European/Indian relations be sanitized while teaching children who, let’s face it, just need to learn how to be respectful humans at this point? Is it possible for political correctness to swing so far one way that it goes all the way back to being offensive and close-minded?      

The Thanksgiving Play, which premiered in 2018 at the Artists Repertoire Theatre in Portland, Oregon before moving to Broadway in 2023, asks all of these questions and more in the funniest way possible. Through its biting satire it discusses important issues like performative activism and cultural insensitivity, showing, with a smile, that although we have come far in this twenty-first century of ours we still have plenty of ground to cover yet.  

The Thanksgiving Play opens at Keizer Homegrown Theatre on November 1st, 2024. It plays every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with the last show being a matinee on the 17th. I'm in it and it is good. Go see it. Or don't. I'm not your boss.

Home - Keizer Homegrown Theatre

House of Spoils (Unpublished)

 

It’s easy to freak people out with food. Just make a character eat something moldy or crawling with bugs and audiences will squirm, or present something delicious and reveal that, surprise, it’s actually the liver of a census taker that is spruced up with fava beans and a nice Chianti. House of Spoils, a new horror film from Blumhouse Television and Amazon, serves up some creepy culinary concoctions, but other than a few banal haunted house trappings it’s not all that scary and ends in the dumbest way possible.

Ariana DeBose gives a strong performance as the main character who is known only as “Chef,” an aspiring restaurant owner who comes to find that her new digs are haunted. Chef's story is considerably more interesting when it’s dealing with the harrowing yet decidedly non-supernatural realities of opening a new business and not touching on anything otherworldly, and DeBose and her supporting cast lend a strong core to a screenplay that doesn’t deserve the effort, especially because the characters are written so thinly. The actual ghost story bits are lacking, especially the resolution, which might just be one of the most baffling things I have ever seen in a horror film. The ghost's motivation seems downright silly if I understood it correctly, and the fact that I don’t know for sure speaks to a lack of clarity that smacks of bad writing rather than an invitation to thoughtfully ponder what was just shown.

When the film is utilizing tried-and-true horror techniques like the typical long, silent walk down a dark hallway that raises stress with every step because you just know that something is going to pop out at any second it works well enough. But tense moments such as these are almost impossible to screw up and are so omnipresent in the horror genre that it doesn't feel like I should give House of Spoils props for this, especially because I've always been someone who is easily scared. Horror aficionados might not even blink at these moments, especially because they never really pay off. Sometimes a spooky hallway is just a spooky hallway, and even when an old lady ghost is around the corner any resulting scare that might occur feels cheap. When it’s not offering spooky hallways and old ladies, House of Spoils leans heavily into the aforementioned food horror thing, which is more gross than anything else in this context. There are only so many times you can watch someone get surprised by an army of cockroaches in a soufflé before even this queasiness wears thin.

House of Spoils has a loose feminine message to it that I appreciate, even if it is vague, unfocused, and sloppy. It may be hard to be a female restaurateur in a man’s world, but this message gets lost a bit in the quagmire that is the rest of the film. If you’re looking for scares this Halloween season look elsewhere. You won’t find any in House of Spoils.

House of Spoils is now available on Amazon Prime.

This review wasn't published in the Keizertimes but you can visit anyway at www.keizertimes.com 

Mr. Crocket (10.18.24)

 

Taking something sweet and comforting and twisting it into something unsettling is a staple of a lot of horror films. When was the last time someone truly appreciated clowns as they were originally supposed to be appreciated, instead of thinking of them as creepy demons that feast on the flesh of innocents? It’s a trope that takes away our safe spaces, giving us no safe harbor to run to when the scary begins. In this tradition, Mr. Crocket turns the idea of a friendly kids show character onto its head and the result is as campy and bloody as you’d expect, but it doesn’t offer anything new or interesting while doing so.

There is a “mascot horror” trend going on in the world of video games, where independent studios, inspired by the hugely popular Five Nights at Freddy’s series, pump out cheap horror games led by creatures that should be cute and child friendly but instead have sharp teeth and kill you. None of them really have any soul and only exist to sell merchandise and go viral, and Mr. Crocket feels a bit like one of these games. It’s as if the writers looked at a list of things that children like and asked themselves “what hasn’t been exploited in the world of horror yet?” and picked Mr. Rogers. Mr. Crocket gleefully kills those he considers bad parents with subversive kids stuff, his cuddly sidekick creatures are actually Jim Henson puppets from hell, and everything is shocking and gory instead of fluffy and nice. Blah blah blah.

None of it is particularly scary and all of it is astonishingly predictable. Every horror trope is in here, from the random bystander that just happens to have the exposition needed to keep the film going to the microfiche research montage to the villain monologue that explains their entire spooky backstory. The characters are thinner than a clown who has gone too long without human flesh and the rules behind the supernatural forces are murky and vague. There just isn’t anything new here.

The acting is pretty good, especially that of Elvis Nolasco, who plays the titular character with a Freddy Krueger-esque mixture of menace and campy glee. And I do appreciate that the special effects are predominantly practical rather than digital. As someone who has always found E.T. and other practical puppets terrifying (except you, Yoda, you’re cool), I found the designs of Mr. Crocket’s “friends” to easily be the most unsettling thing about the film, even if the creativity for some started and ended with “put sharp teeth on it and make it look all decayed looking.”

As I write this two hours after watching the film I find myself constantly having to go back and check what exactly the name of the character/movie actually was. Was it Mr. Cranston? Mr. Cormick? I know it started with a C… this was my experience with the film in a nutshell. It was here, it held my eyeballs for ninety minutes, and then it was gone.

Mr. Crocket (that’s it!) is now available on Hulu.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on October 18^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.

 

Salem's Lot (10.11.24)

 

I have never found vampires particularly frightening. Perhaps it is because I have always been a religious person and religious stuff is kryptonite to the bloodsucking undead. Perhaps it’s because vampires are subject to a bunch of comfortably convenient rules, like not being able to go out in the day or not being able to enter someone’s dwelling unless invited. Whatever the reason, I was not expecting Salem’s Lot to frighten me half as much as it did, at least in the first half, but as the film went on it became apparent that a whole Lot of problems were going to keep it from becoming a genuine horror classic. 

A fresh-out-of-the-coffin adaptation of Stephen King's classic novel, Salem’s Lot was actually filmed years ago with a theatrical release in mind, only to be shelved and then quietly released on Max (formerly known as HBO Max). Like a couple of bloody puncture wounds on a pale neck, this was not a terribly good omen of things to come, but I forgot about the film’s tortured past as I jumped straight into some unexpectedly spooky vampire action that was greatly complemented by some solid direction and style (thank goodness they set the story in its original year of 1975 instead of doing the boring thing and updating it to today). I am not a connoisseur of horror films by any means, but the first hour or so of Salem’s Lot was highly effective for me, with plentiful scares and an unsettling atmosphere to boot. The music is forgettable but does its job well, and the cinematography has a creative flare behind it that leads to some truly fantastic shots. Salem’s Lot, much like the titular town, looks great on the surface, but also like the town it turns out to be a bit dead inside on closer inspection.

The biggest knock against Salem’s Lot is a distinct lack of characterization and world building. The original novel, which happens to be one of my favorite works by Stephen King, is considerably shorter than most Stephen King books, but there was still so much cut out of it as to be unrecognizable. The characters are as one-dimensional as can be, particularly the bad guys, who we learn absolutely nothing about, and the ending is so different from that of the novel that I briefly forgot that I was watching an adaptation of something that I had read before. Like a vampire, Salem’s Lot doesn’t have any real spirit to it, and even the creative camerawork gets exhausting as the film continuously returns to its favorite tricks over and over again. Perhaps a mini series would have been the way to go. Or maybe we just needed another scene or two to flesh characters and the story out. As it stands Salem’s Lot is a passable summary of a much greater novel rather than a great story itself. You could do much worse, though.

Salem’s Lot is now available on Max.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on October 11^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com.

Will & Harper (10.04.24)

 

“Okay, just walking into the room and sitting down the way you sometimes see at the top of a documentary. Where they use the B-roll, but the person... the subject didn't realize they were gonna use it. But it's all natural.”

This is how Will Ferrell starts Will & Harper, and it is a quote that hits upon the biggest question I always have while watching documentaries: Just how much authenticity, emotional or otherwise, can be allowed in such a format when the subjects know that they are being filmed? Doesn’t the very act of observation dilute the truthfulness of the observations? This was what was on my mind when I first jumped into Will & Harper, but this skeptical attitude melted just as quickly as this hardened, world-weary heart of mine did, because this particular documentary hits different. Beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious, and important, Will & Harper, the story of a cross-country road trip between two old Saturday Night Live buddies as they attempt to recontextualize their friendship after one of them transitioned, just may be the realest thing I have seen in years, cameras be damned.

Harper Steele, a former SNL writer who began her tenure on the long-running sketch show at the same time as Will Ferrell, transitioned fairly late in life after much strife and heartache, and like many transgender people she was afraid of how her friends, family, and America as a whole would treat her after she became who she had always been. Ferrell, an open-minded guy who nonetheless still had some questions, suggested the road trip idea to hash it all out. What follows is sometimes uncomfortable (not everyone they come into contact with is as open minded or accepting as Will Ferrell), often heart-breaking (Harper doesn’t mince words when it comes to her mental health and identity struggles, both pre-transition and post), but it is mostly just nice, for lack of a spicier word. True friendship knows no gender, and these two people have friendship in spades.

 

Although serious in its subject matter, Will & Harper also boasts plenty of laughs, which is natural considering the comedic backgrounds of both of our subjects. These lighter moments are welcome, and to the credit of our SNL alums (as well as director Josh Greenbaum and editor Monique Zavistovski) these laughs are never allowed to cheapen or minimize the serious moments; it would have been easy to make jokes to lessen the sad, infuriating, or awkward parts, but these are just as much part of Will & Harper as the joyful ones. It is an important film for people who have transgender individuals in their lives or just wish to understand the world better; as Harper says several times, there is nothing wrong with asking questions, and we can't be afraid to do so, no matter how uncomfortable asking these questions might make us.

When it comes to documentaries, it doesn’t get any more real than Will & Harper.

Will & Harper is now available on Netflix.

 

This review was first published in the Keizertimes on October 4^th, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com