Thanksgiving Dinner

In setting the play on Thanksgiving, and in using Thanksgiving dinner as the centerpiece of its action, the play is using all of the implied meanings and associations with the holiday to make an ironic, metaphoric point about how the things being celebrated are, in fact, masks for / diversions from a deep sense of fear, pervasive in American culture as a whole as well as in the lives of the Blake family.

In America, Thanksgiving is almost as significant a holiday as Christmas. Both holidays are times of connection with family; both holidays, in drama at least, are times when such connections are often threaded with secrets, recriminations, and confrontation; and both holidays are associated with conspicuous consumption of food and consumer goods. Thanksgiving differs from Christmas, however, because of its significant patriotic sensibility: Thanksgiving is tied to an early historical event, the arrival of...