Indian Princesses, at the Corner of Cringe and Compassion

Indian Princesses, an Off Broadway debut at the Atlantic Theater Company, centers on five girls growing up under the care of tragically well-meaning white dads. The play carries recognizable echoes of other contemporary works and pop culture from the 1990s and 2000s, yet it remains an original story rather than a pastiche. The girls struggle to find language for difficult realities, and the fathers’ efforts to communicate often fall short. The girls are not white, and the fathers attempt to manage identity and participation through a 2008-era, YMCA-sanctioned “tribe” concept. The result is nuanced humor and a sense of hope that people may be improving at talking about hard things.

"If Eliana Theologides Rodriguez isn't in conscious conversation with certain plays and playwrights in her own immediate theatrical family tree - call them her older artistic cousins, or perhaps her uncles and aunts - she's still richly and clearly steeped in their work. Her wonderfully sharp and poignant Off Broadway debut, Indian Princesses (now at the Atlantic Theater Company in a co-production with Rattlestick), shares features with Jeremy O. Harris's , Clare Barron's Dance Nation, and Larissa FastHorse's The Thanksgiving Play while also winking at movies like Bring It On and Addams Family Values, as prevalent in the diet of '90s and aughts kids as Lunchables and lip gloss."

"The play, however, is no pastiche. Its story of five girls - all navigating preteenagerdom under the stewardship of their tragically well-meaning white dads - stands firmly on its own legs, even staring down some of its progenitors. It's much more nuanced (and much funnier) than The Thanksgiving Play, and it has none of Harris's showy aggression. While watching its characters strain for language that keeps eluding them, I felt an ironic kind of hope: Maybe we really are getting better at talking about hard things, or at least at writing about them."

"If words quickly start to fail these girls and their fathers, it's because unlike their fathers, the daughters of Indian Princesses aren't white. They are - as Glen (Frank Wood, bubbling with wince-inducing Michael Scott enthusiasm) would call them - "diverse." To grant him some grace, he is trying very hard, and it is 2008. The recession is in full swing, and somewhere in the American heartland, "Chief Glen" is attempting to scrape together enough participation for an official "YMCA-sanctioned tribe" of - well, the title says it."

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