Comedy, colonialism at Thanksgiving table

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Here’s how woke the white people in “The Thanksgiving Play,” now in a City Lights Theater Company production, try to be: “I am conscious of not allowing my personal issues to take up more space in the room than the justified anger of the Native people around this idea of Thanksgiving.”

That’s Logan (Caitlin

Gjerdrum), and she’s directing a holiday play-within-a-play for elementary schoolers. Hoping to avoid the racist tropes of traditional holiday pageants, she’s brought on a historian and a Native American actor.

But the tentacles of colonialism creep in everywhere, to the point of suffocation, in this comedy, which is set to make playwright Larissa FastHorse the first Native American woman to have a play on Broadway when it opens at the Helen Hayes Theater next year.

For City Lights, Roneet Aliza Rahamim directs the reductio ad absurdum of political correctness. “The Thanksgiving Play”: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Nov. 17-19. Through Dec. 18. $24-$54. City Lights Theater Company, 529 S. Second St., San Jose. 408-295-4200. https://cltc.org

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Christian Pizzirani/City Lights Theater Company