There are a lot of different reasons to laugh at a joke. From simply silly to tongue-in-cheek to tragic, humor is universally appealing. “The Thanksgiving Play” at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park touches on every type of joke there is. Larissa FastHorse has written a play that turns a mirror on the audience and gets us to laugh at what we see.

Set in a high school gym “somewhere in the United States,” our local version takes place at Neil Armstrong High School. The cast are four people getting together to devise a Thanksgiving play for the students. The performance, around 90 minutes with no intermission, orbits the topic of Thanksgiving and how to perform it for children while being mindful of every possible ramification and perception.

The two key organizers Logan (Jennifer Bareilles) and Jaxton (Scott Parkinson) are every liberal cliche in the book, taken to the extreme. They begin the process of collaboration by covering their genitals and vowing to act only as “gender neutral collaborators” instead of the romantic couple they are outside of work. This is where FastHorse has written much of her satirical commentary on so-called liberal “allies.” They are so obsessed with correctly observing the holiday and the historical impacts to indigenous peoples that they are paralyzed.

Alicia (Ashley Austin Morris) and Caden (Nat DeWolf) round out the crew as the absurdly ditzy professional actress and the school district history buff and theater fan. They are, in their own ways, probably more Woke than either of the self-proclaimed allies. Alicia, content to rely on her looks and her narrow career focus, doesn’t think much about anything. Caden understands the history many of us learned as contemporary white Americans is meaningless and often demonstrably false.

Ricocheting between cringe-worthy self examination and apocalyptic tone-deafness, liberal pontificating and sexual innuendo, this piece is smart, painful and utterly hilarious. Larissa FastHorse knows that while liberals love to pay lip service to honoring the downtrodden, we often have no idea how to actually do that. I won’t spoil the play that the group comes up with by the end of the performance, but you’d probably guess it doesn’t set the social disorder to rights.

The choice of performances to run at the Playhouse is a testament to the willingness to push the envelope and the audience. I’m grateful for the opportunity to see this play. I laughed hard and often, but I left self-reflecting and humbled. The program includes an insert that shows historical indigenous lands circa 1720 — a map of the U.S. that has been completely annihilated.

Running March 23 to April 21, see “The Thanksgiving Play” at the Shelterhouse Theater at Cincinnait Playhouse in the Park.

John David Back is a Cincinnati native who lives and works in OTR. He’s an avid reader and a mediocre writer who loves the experience of art and beauty. Tell him what he should experience and send fan mail to johndavidback@gmail.com.