It’s 2008, in the middle of the financial crisis, and a group of white suburban dads has signed up to connect with their young daughters, ages 9 to 12, in the YMCA program known as Indian Princesses — a term now considered a slur by many in the Native community. And that’s to say nothing about the rampant cultural appropriation of an afterschool activity that focuses on making dreamcatchers and teaching lessons about the first Thanksgiving that seem at best antiquated. The five girls in Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s little tribe share another quality that both binds them together while maintaining a distance from their fathers and guardians: They’re all nonwhite (or at least of mixed race), including two sisters (Anissa Marie Griego and Serenity Mariana) whose mom claims descent from the Tewa and Yaqui people.
Rodriguez, who claims similar ancestry and identifies as Mexican but not Native, grapples with the thorny question of identity through the lens of young girls who are only beginning to come to terms with their difference — in families that are similarly reluctant to probe those issues. The girls themselves are not as reticent, quizzing the half-Mexican Andi (Rebecca Jimenez) about her hairy arms and questioning whether Griego’s theater-loving Lily can ever play her dream role of Penny Pingleton, the perky blonde mean girl in Hairspray. The cast smartly captures the naivety of preteens who can blunder into wild offensiveness with charming innocence, and also hug out their differences with easy-going alacrity.
The relationships with the parents are more challenging. Samantha (Haley Wong), the half-Japanese girl raised by the hyper-religious grandfather who also serves as the group’s “chief” (Frank Wood), internalizes every comment and slight as an invitation to self-flagellation. Meanwhile, Maisey (Lark White), the Black adoptive daughter of a blue-collar guy (Pete Simpson) currently out of work, is a whip-smart fireball with an overactive imagination and a penchant for fantasy fiction. Chris (Greg Keller), the proto-woke, college-educated stepdad of Hazel and Lily, pulls Maisey’s dad aside at one point to spell out the issue: “You ever wonder why she’s so obsessed with magic and fantasy? You’re not giving her any information to ground her in real life!” The comment is apt, though we already intuited this point without Rodriguez spelling it out so bluntly.
There’s a lot to unpack here, and Rodriguez and director Miranda Cornell don’t always manage the transitions between the satiric and the dramatic. A late climactic scene in which the girls and the dads dress up to perform “America the Beautiful the Play” to all the other campers goes off the rails in a way that is genuinely chaotic. For some reason, the group is sorting out elements of the script in real time, in front of an audience. (They’re particularly stumped on how to insert poor Maisey into the Thanksgiving story — and how to avoid mentioning the transatlantic slave trade.) It doesn’t make much sense, playing like a weak parody of similar but sharper satirical scenes from Tracy Letts’s The Minutes or Larissa Fasthorse’s Thanksgiving Play.
Indian Princesses works best when the girls are interacting with each other. Growing up in a place where they don’t see many others like themselves, including within their own homes, they find a kind of sisterhood in shared outsiderness. It helps that the cast capture both preteen preococity, casual cruelty, and the impulse for reconciliation. And Rodriguez is generous enough to respect her characters’ individuality — particularly the grown-ups who often turn a blind eye to their daughters’ needs, sometimes unwittingly and with the best of intentions. Not all blundering fathers are built the same, or inflict the same kind of psychological damage. ★★★☆☆
INDIAN PRINCESSES
Atlantic Theater Company, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 7 for $57 to $132