The Thanksgiving Play

Jaxton is a “yoga guy”—not a yoga teacher, as he explains to Caden, but someone who takes a lot of yoga classes. He is also a busker and street performer who fancies himself to be a professional actor and local celebrity because he is (in a sense) paid by the tips that people put in his coffee can. Additionally, Jaxton frequently volunteers as an actor in school plays, which he considers to be part of his supposed acting career.

Jaxton is a white, heterosexual, cisgender man who is “politically correct to a fault, a big one” (7). He knows how to acknowledge his privilege, but he has no desire to dismantle it. He sees the acknowledgement as the full extent of his responsibility and justification for his smugness. One clear example of the difference between Jaxton’s and Logan’s versions of activism is their differing commitments to veganism. Logan gags at the thought of animal products, while Jaxton assumes the activist credibility of calling himself a “vegan ally” while making exceptions for dairy cheese. Where Logan must embrace Performative Wokeness and White Privilege/Guilt to shore up her own self-image, resulting in deep anxiety over perceived missteps, Jaxton does so merely for social clout. More specifically, he weaponizes social awareness as a shield from accountability, which is betrayed by his occasional flashes of toxic masculinity. For instance, he insists that using they/them pronouns for a year exempts him from responsibility for calling Logan a misogynistic slur. While Logan is out of earshot, Jaxton tells Caden that he dismisses Logan’s frustrations with him by presuming that they’re just part of her “feminine rage.” When Logan hurts his feelings, Jaxton treats the moment as a profound experience that elevates his understanding of social oppression—with the notable exception of insults that threaten his masculinity. Jaxton represents the faux activist who treats social justice as an aesthetic while doing and accomplishing nothing. He is accustomed to privilege, and he isn’t willing to even entertain the idea of giving it up, crying oppression the moment his voice isn’t centered. In the end, Jaxton helps Logan to let go and embrace nothing as well.

Caden teaches history at an elementary school, but he asserts from the beginning that he views himself as a history scholar at a much higher level than his job suggests. He is socially awkward and a bit odd, and unlike Logan and Jaxton, he makes no pretense of “wokeness.” However, he does want badly to be accepted by them, which means sometimes (poorly) mimicking their tendency to fall into random yoga poses or meditation. Caden is invited into the project as a history consultant, but it quickly becomes clear that his deepest desire is to work in theater. Caden is an aspiring playwright, having seemingly written stacks of scenes and plays that he has previously foisted upon his elementary students to read aloud. He arrives at the rehearsal with a play’s worth of scenes already written, becoming emotionally overwhelmed when he hears his words read aloud by adult actors for the first time.

Caden’s knowledge of early American history is extensive, but he takes a rigid view of historical accuracy, pushing the white-centered narrative he knows as gospel. Caden is similarly uncompromising about his stilted dialogue, refusing to allow the others to so much as experiment with replacing the lines of the Indigenous characters with silence. As a white man, Caden represents the historical record that has been written and maintained by white men, actively resisting any attempts to decenter white supremacy. Caden’s staunch commitment to historical fact also yields a proposed reenactment of Indigenous genocide that demonstrates why the popularly disseminated Thanksgiving origin story is based on a fabricated event: The real story is simply not appropriate for children.