The Stagecrafters Theater opens the holiday season with "The Thanksgiving Play" by Larissa FastHorse, a free-wheeling comedy about people who trifle with the struggles of Native Americans.

You find yourself in the familiar territory of behind-the-scenes theater. Logan, a high school drama teacher, is on the skids. Her last production was such a flop that many now demand her ouster. Logan hopes to keep her job by producing a novel Thanksgiving play from the Indigenous people's point of view.

She obtains funding from the "Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art Grant,” and uses the money to hire a Native American actress from Los Angeles. Logan wants to "devise" a drama using the Hollywood actress as the main character.  But this creative effort hits a speed bump when Logan learns the actress she hired is a white American starlet from Tinseltown.

Richard Stewart's simple set design is part high school cafeteria table and part theater stage, a confusion of props that mirrors the cross-purposes swirling through the one-day rehearsal. Director Mariangela Saavedra encourages mayhem as her four-member cast acts out their characters with burlesque vigor. 

Sarah Heddins plays Logan, the besieged drama director. Heddins portrays a distraught artist manque whose frenzy is rooted in a fearfulness that seems to go beyond the threat of losing her job. Logan is reduced to near breathlessness as she thrashes around the stage seeking a plausible story.

Daniel Romano plays Jaxton, an actor and Yoga enthusiast. Jaxton is also Logan's lover, easing her through moments of crisis with timely breathing exercises. Ryan Kirchner is Caden, a fellow high school teacher. He researches proposed drama notions for historical accuracy. Caden is also a frustrated playwright, overjoyed whenever his theater ideas are taken seriously.

Caden lusts after Alicia, the L.A. actress. Samantha Leah Smith plays her as the only happy person on the stage. Dressed in tight-fitting jeans, Smith flounces about in a continuous stream of erotic poses. Alicia wants nothing to do with writing, gaily reports that she is low-IQ and only wants to live the simple life of an actress.

The fast-moving 90-minute show is broken into short scenes when the rear stage periodically turns into a movie screen to play elementary school sequences that mock the cliches of the Thanksgiving holiday. In one episode, children sing "On the 12 days of Thanksgiving the Natives gave to me"...things like a smashed pumpkin or three broken arrows. In another skit, children and adults play with clay finger puppets that spoof the reduction of Native American life to mascot emblems.

Playwright Larissa FastHorse is the first Native American woman to have a show produced on Broadway. According to scuttlebutt, FastHorse had trouble finding theaters to her other work because producers thought there were no suitable Native Americans to play the roles in her scripts. This experience induced her to write "The Thanksgiving Play," in which Logan exclaims, "Let's see how we can support Native Americans without them." 

Logan eschews "Red Face" characters but develops the idea of Alicia dreaming she is Native American. In that way, she argues, their play can show how Native Americans have been "erased" from American history and yet, can still be present.

At one level, "The Thanksgiving Play" is a send-up of  "Devised Theater," improvisational theater in which the collective troupe creates drama without a pre-existing script. In passing, FastHorse also takes jabs movements she describes as trendy including - yoga, gender politics and veganism. 

But her main interest is to lay bare the underbelly of social activism. Sexpot Alicia is the only character in "Thanksgiving" who has a centered personality.  Free of self-congratulatory idealism, Alicia knows who she is. Her plain, party-girl presence works well as foil and has an intrinsic interest.

Alicia contrasts with the other three characters who hide behind a facade of social concern to advance private agendas. Logan wants to keep her job and Caden suffers from a welter of self-esteem issues. You sense Jaxton will latch onto any cause that keeps him in sexual contact with Logan and lets him take cleansing Yoga breaths.

As satire, "The Thanksgiving Play" falls short. Saavedra and her cast do a decent job of playing the cards they are dealt. But the stick-figure, social activist characters are mere buffoons, and the cast follows suit by acting out their roles in a clownish way. The play is branded a satire, but its scoffing humor feels more like simple contempt.

Stagecrafters is located at 8130 Germantown Ave. "The Thanksgiving Play" will run through Dec 8. Tickets available at 215-247-8881.