Review by Ron Fassler …
With so many interesting plays these days dealing with young teenage women, Dad Don’t Read This struggles to find its place among them.
Plays about teenage girls seem to be in the zeitgeist. Ever since Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain was a hit on Broadway a year ago, there have been a plethora of plays cast with older actresses playing younger. This past month alone saw three of them: the Atlantic Theatre’s Indian Princesses, by Eliana Theologides Rodriguez, about a YMCA father-daughter bonding program, and Eisa Davis’s ||:Girls:||:Chance:||:Music:||, set at a girls’ music program in Berkeley, California, and the Public Theatre’s Girl Interrupted by Martyna Majok and Aimee Mann, a musical based on Susanah Kaysen’s memoir and 1999 film adaptation on young women in a psychiatric hospital. Mention can also be made of 2025’s Trophy Boys, by Emmanuelle Mattana, in which young actresses played young boys, and Natalie Margolin’s All-Nighter, about a group of collegiates cramming for their finals, both of which played at MCC. All of these, mind you, in the past year and a half.
Now to add to that list is Dad Don’t Read This, a new play by Eliya Smith, which opened last night for a three-week engagement at Greenwich House, transferring from a recent brief run at St. Luke’s Theatre. Smith’s prior play Grief Camp, which played the Atlantic last season, featured a cast of teenagers, making clear this is the playwright’s comfort zone. For Dad Don’t Read This, directed by Chloe Claudel, the cast of four acquit themselves with guts and honesty (and good humor) but are caught in the web of a sticky storyline that spins itself without going nowhere. Set at a succession of sleepovers at one of the girl’s houses, the conversations meander and, if they land at all, land softly. At this point, audiences asked to sit through plays such as these need to know why and to what purpose. Smith, much in the way she devised Grief Camp, seems more concerned with creating characters than plots for them to work through. It’s admirable to hear certain speeches that capture real talk and the genuine anxiety that a 2026 teenager might be experiencing, but without a solid structure it’s just so much talk.
The actors are quite wonderful. As Mal, the one whose home in which the play is set, Amalia Yoo gives a layered performance that is marvelously physical. The way she flops around her bedroom is both funny and real, though her character arc is a confusing one (the irony that Yoo was in the Broadway cast of the far superior John Proctor was not lost on this critic). Renée-Nicole Powell gives a strong performance as Noelle, even though she is the least defined of the four. Possessing a strong theatre voice, she has a commanding presence. Of note, both she and Yoo were in Grief Camp, aligning them once again with playwright Smith.
Kayta Thomas portrays Lida as the goofy, long-limbed bundle of nerves she is offering a persuasive flair for comedy. And Sophie Rossman as Sophie (coincidence?) delivers the play’s best piece of writing with a piercing vulnerability in a beautiful monologue about an encounter with an overly friendly friend of her father’s.
Sorry to report that Forest Entsminger’s set is minimalistic and not especially eye-catching with too few props and details to allow the actresses to live in it effectively. And Abigail Sage and Finn Bamber’s lighting design is far too basic in its bedroom setting. Costumes by Olivia Vaughn Hern, however, feels lived in and right for the characters.
As a dad myself, I recall how my daughter was obsessed at the age of nine with the computer game Sims, first introduced in the year 2000. It allows you to create your own little world, a dollhouse really, and it plays an important role in Dad Don’t Read This, a symbol of the girls’ searching for ways to control things in their chaotic lives. I used to remember the jabber coming out of my daughter’s bedroom and couldn’t understand what any of it meant. As one of the girls in the play says about the Sims voices, “Maybe this is how we sound to God?”
Dad Don’t Read This is at Greenwich House Theatre, 27 Barrow Street, NYC.
Photos by Maria Baranova.
Headline photo: Renée-Nicole Powell as Noelle and Amalia Yoo as Mal in Dad Don’t Read This.
