Design Statement
The Thanksgiving Play is a show all about the absurdity of white people navigating putting on a thanksgiving play. Exploring white guilt, performative antiracism, and how white people often avoid real discomfort when doing antiracism work which perpetuates more harm. The script reveals the absurdity of this belief system by juxtaposing realistic classroom scenes of performality anti racism and scenes of K-12 structural racism surrounding thanksgiving with scenes of indigenous resistance. The lighting emphasizes this shift by lighting the two types of scene vastly differently. The classroom scenes are lit in a realistic stark ‘florescent’ light. It is bright, but uninviting and feels oppressive, while the indigenous resistance scenes are lit in bold color. This bright color crafts an inviting, optimistic, upbeat feeling for these scenes. This creates a positive association for the audiences, which aids the script's goal of motivating the audience to do the harder work to break through performative activism and take more active steps in uplifting indigenous people.