Kate Benson’s new comedy explores a family Thanksgiving in ways you’d never expect

It’s the kind of shocked expression that occurs after you see a truly amazing ballgame. The look on your face is a dumb, mouth-agape grin. You’re slightly giggling and have the urge to cheer at the top of your lungs. But you’re not watching a sports match. You’re watching an innovative piece of theater. In Kate Benson’s incomparable A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes, sport and theater are equated in ways you’d never expect. As directed with a perfectly in-tune idiosyncratic style by Lee Sunday Evans, Benson’s debut comedy, a coproduction of New Georges and Women’s Project Theater at New York City Center – Stage II, will leave you breathless as it disassembles the time-tested genre of family play. Thanksgiving is the perfect occasion for a marriage of athletics and drama. After all, how many times have people gotten into arguments between the festive holiday meal and the ritualistic viewing of the annual football game? Her setting is a typical Midwestern home that is about to be infiltrated with many generations of relations. Cheesecake (Brooke Ishibashi, the perfect OCD mom) is in charge; it’s her house, after all. Her sisters, Cherry Pie (Heather Alicia Simms) and Trifle (Nina Hellman) join her in the kitchen and dining room. Will they need an extra table to fit everyone comfortably? In that case, they’ll also require multiple plates of every dish. They simply cannot have a repeat of the Gravy Boat Episode of 1979. No one has ever forgotten that.