The word around school was that she had been in love with a minor-league baseball player, a catcher named Filbert. She was single, in her mid-twenties, and the boys were in agreement that she was attractive, though perhaps not “a babe”. Miss Bird was their 6th grade teacher at Shepherdstown Middle School.

It’s unclear exactly when these grotesqueries were written, but they make stronger points than anything else happening onstage.On a Wednesday in October, in the school cafeteria, Carlton said to his friend Bobby, “I wonder what Miss Bird looks like naked?” Bobby replied that he had just been thinking the same thing. Interspersed throughout the fictional goings-on are videos projections of school kids reciting apparently real-life grade-school Thanksgiving songs, appallingly racist and violent. Such far-fetched lines pile up like so many Thanksgiving turkey bones, the dialogue as inexplicable as the sudden appearance of bloody human prop heads (this is a grade school, please remember, even if the playwright doesn’t) and out-of-character actions (yoga dude somehow gets his hands on blue face paint and goes full-on Braveheart). “Just the ones that everyone watches,” she replies, a response the audience understands even if the dimwits on stage don’t.Īsked how they can learn more about these games, the actress says, “I think the Chiefs are playing Monday, right?”Ĭomes the response, “There’s a whole game just for chiefs? That’s amazing!” “We just ate food and watched games,” she says. We’re meant to believe that a grade-school production is to star a professional Los Angeles actress? That even in the post-George Floyd era (he’s name-checked, in fact) there’s real government “diversity” money to be had for such productions? That even the most cluelessly “woke” do-gooders could have an exchange like the one in which they ask the not-so-Native American actress about her family’s holiday traditions. The liberal teacher and her equally earnest boyfriend are determined to present a politically correct account of the Pilgrim-Native American feast story, and so have recruited that history-slash-playwright-wannab teacher as well as the actress they believe will provide a non-white perspective.įrom the get-go, the premise asks a lot of the audience.

Set in an elementary school classroom, the play follows four white adults – a drama teacher, her sometime-actor “yoga dude” boyfriend, a high school history instructor, and a Los Angeles actress, mistakenly thought to be of Native American descent – tasked with staging this year’s Thanksgiving play. So where exactly does this Thanksgiving go awry? Starts with the soup, ends with the nuts. 'Shucked', 'Kimberly Akimbo', 'Fat Ham' Could See Sales Boost With Tony Nominations - Broadway Box Office

Bloody bones novel