Theatre in Review: Dad Don't Read This (Greenwich House Theatre)

	Amalia Yoo. Photo: Valerie Terranova

One can be forgiven for approaching Greenwich House Theatre with trepidation these nights. We have been so recently oversupplied with plays about the sheer hell of being a teenager that one suspects that an outpost of ChatGPT is spitting out similarly themed scripts on an industrial scale. But, from the get-go, Dad Don't Read This toys with one's expectations. For example: Is that really Julie Andrews singing "The Lusty Month of May" as the lights come up?

Indeed, it is, and it's not the only curveball thrown by Eliya Smith in this slice of Southern Ohio life during the late Obama years. Sophie, one of the play's quartet of friends (sometimes frenemies), apparently keeps a Broadway sex playlist. (As played by Sophie Rossman, she's also a fluent tap dancer, demonstrating her skills to, of all things, a cover of "California Dreamin.") Mal, the group's hostess, regularly disappears from school for reasons unknown and is tormented by thoughts of Eddie Redmayne possibly being a pervert. She also offers her friends swigs from a bottle containing "vodka and gin and tequila and wine and then a different wine and also a little bit of beer and... no, that's it." No wonder most of it ends up on the floor.

There's also Noelle, whose has plans for the future: "I'm gonna live in a really tall building and throw spaghetti at the people who walk under my window and I'm gonna have an ant farm and throw parties every night where someone brings cool lights and we do a spotlight on the ant farm and everyone dances in a circle around it and I won't know anyone there." Lida is less assertive, though there was that time she made apple fritters that induced an anaphylactic reaction in a teacher. Still, when her buttons are pushed, she blows up as only a frustrated, hormonal, confused adolescent can. Throughout, Smith has an uncanny knack for getting inside her characters' heads, anatomizing their dreams, fantasies, and fears.

Dad Don't Read This unfolds in a whirl of gossip, confidences, confrontations, private jokes, and lengthy sessions with The Sims, to which all are inordinately devoted. This device is a little too on-the-nose: Smith leans heavily (and repetitively) on the notion that her characters are devoted to the game's world-building aspect as an escape from the chaos of their lives. On the other hand, she adds a note of wit that contrasts favorably with Else Went's Initiative, recently seen at the Public, which explored the fascinations of Dungeons and Dragons at tedious length.

And, to be sure, Dad Don't Read This is an enormous step forward from Grief Camp, Smith's debut piece, seen at the Atlantic Theater last season; trying to explore the sensitivities of young people suffering catastrophic losses, that play collapsed under the weight of its many interminable whimsies. Here, she frames Mal and the others in sharper perspective, giving us a window into a world that, in their view, turns stranger and more hostile by the day. The signs are many and ominous: Mal's parents can be heard offstage, engaging in a bruising, nonstop squabble. A well-regarded teacher is, according to rumor, a probable sexual abuser. Sophie catches her father watching a porn video; she also has an unsettling encounter, outside a restroom in a local restaurant, with an older man who turns out to be a friend of her father's. In its best moments, Dad Don't Read This catches the four friends anxiously traversing the treacherous landscape between youth and imminent adulthood, a journey none of them is entirely convinced she wants to make.

Chloe Claudel's assured production, making the most of the script's overlapping dialogue and caught-on-the-fly conversations, features fine work from the ensemble of four. In addition to Rossman, they include Amalia Yoo, steely and faintly enigmatic as Mal; Renee-Nicole Powell, deadpan and sometimes disconcertingly blunt as Noelle; and Katya Thomas, insecure but nobody's fool as Lida. Also, Forest Entsminger's scenic design, a spare depiction of Mal's bedroom, combines with Abigail Sage and Finn Bamber's lighting to create a couple of spectacular effects. Mitchell Polonsky's sound design combines eccentric music choices (including more than one cut from Camelot) with faithfully rendered Sims sound effects. I do not doubt that costume designer Olivia Vaughn Hern knows exactly how Ohio teenagers dressed a decade ago.

For all the talent involved, Dad Don't Read This triggers a couple of troubling thoughts. According to the script, Mal and the others are all sixteen and a half; seeing the production, I assumed they were in the last year of middle school. Are these overwrought creatures, mired in fantasy and prone to outbursts, really one year away from college? (More worryingly, are they almost ready to vote?) Maturity, it seems, exists on a sliding scale. Then again, in the last couple of seasons, How to Defend Yourself; John Proctor is the Villain; Trophy Boys; All Nighter; Initiative; Grief Camp; Girls Girls, Chance Chance, Music Music; Indian Princesses; and Girl, Interrupted, have portrayed young people, mostly girls, as a lost tribe, at odds with the prospect of growing up and getting no help from adults. If, to quote the title of a Kenneth Lonergan play, this is our youth, we are in big trouble. Many of these plays are very strong; collectively, despite their vapid settings and socioeconomic circumstances, they feel distressingly similar. There are worse things than being sixteen.

Still, we're talking mostly about early-career playwrights who, having achieved a measure of success, may soon move on to more ambitious projects. Let's hope so; in that sense, it's best to see Dad Don't Read This as a promissory note against plays to come; clearly, Smith has the talent. --David Barbour