Fathers Crave Forgiveness Amid Culture Clashes in ‘Indian Princesses’

One of the perks of seeing theater on a regular basis is that you can watch performers as they blossom. In recent years, youthful ensembles have lent vigor, charm, and poignance to numerous shows on and off-Broadway; like many of them, Eliana Theologides Rodriguez’s “Indian Princesses,” now playing at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, in a co-production with Rattlestick Theater, focuses on girls and young women — or more accurately, as in some other cases, girls played by young women.The title refers to a YMCA program that Ms. Theologides Rodriguez, who’s only 28 herself, took part in as a ten-year-old. Launched about a century ago as “Indian Guides,” it first allowed fathers and sons to take part in bonding activities inspired by indigenous culture. Most of them were white, and as appropriation became a bigger concern, the program was rebranded as “Adventure Guides” or “Voyagers,” and eventually eclipsed in popularity by a father-daughter equivalent, now generally called “Adventure Princesses.”Set in 2008, when the playwright and her sister were princesses — in a note inserted into the program, Ms. Theologides Rodriguez explains their dad enrolled them in the wake of the financial crisis that year — the play introduces us to four men and the girls they are raising. Only one, Mac, is a biological father, to 12-year-old Andi; Glen, the group leader, is grandfather to Samantha, nine, while Wayne and his wife adopted Maisey, ten, and Chris is stepfather to Lily, 11, and Hazel, nine.The men in this tribe, as Glen calls it, are all white, though its female contingent is racially and ethnically diverse: Andi is half-white and half-Mexican, Samantha half-white and half-Japanese; Maisley is black, and Lily and Hazel belong to the Yaqui, indigenous people of Mexico and North America, and the Tewa, Pueblo Native Americans; Ms. Theologides Rodriguez’s own maternal family is descended from those two groups.It’s the perfect setup for a culture clash, with skin color, heritage, gender, and age all in play. Class and politics also enter the fray: Chris, a lawyer, is almost comically worried about his privilege as a white man, which increasingly irritates the proudly blue-collar Mac. “A man’s gotta be thinking about what’s right for his family,” Mac huffs at one point, shortly after Chris has left their meeting room; meanwhile, the latter is in the hall, lecturing Andi on Western imperialism.But “Princesses” is hardly a polemic. As the men and girls interact together and separately, Chris emerges as the play’s least sympathetic figure, a guy who prizes his own humility and empathy but likely also considers himself the smartest person in the room, and repeatedly does and says thoughtless things as a result. Greg Keller’s performance relays both his smugness and his overeagerness; even his voice is irritating, high-pitched and whiny.The playwright, to her credit, doesn’t suggest that Chris’s concerns are entirely performative, or that he doesn’t care for his stepdaughters. The characters here are all drawn with nuance and humor, and under Miranda Cornell’s direction, they are all made fully, at times frustratingly human. Pete Simpson ably blends gruffness with pathos as Mac, who recently lost his wife, while Ben Beckley brings an unmannered sensitivity to Wayne, who’s quieter than the others but has his own struggles.Stage veteran Frank Wood is amusing and touching as the relentlessly well-meaning Glen, who must deal with both reluctance and overzealousness from the other dads while managing a close but somewhat strained relationship with Samantha, as she comes to feel increasingly confused and burdened by her grandpa’s Christian ideals.The girls are the real focus of this story, though — what they learn about and through each other, and how they all grapple with their imperfect guardians. Ms. Cornell has recruited young performers who capture their individual quirks, as well as the precocity and sensitivity they share. Andi is the sliest of the bunch, though just as vulnerable as the rest, and a marvelous Rebecca Jimenez captures her often tough, dry wit and the hurt it can conceal.Lily, a musical theater enthusiast, is also prone to burying her feelings and particularly to anxiety, and Anissa Marie Griego makes her intensity alternately funny and heartbreaking. Though Samantha is more palpably fragile, Haley Wong also gives her a delicate resilience, and as Hazel, who’s less conflicted but just as needy — really the baby of the bunch, though she and Samantha are the same age — Serenity Mariana adds a rush of sometimes sassy exuberance. Maisey is the most mysterious, with a gentle benevolence, beautifully illustrated by Lark White, and a back story involving a mother who was a healer and a dad who was a wizard, which may have been informed by the Harry Potter series and her own clearly vivid imagination. The girls believe she has supernatural powers, and as “Indian Princesses” wraps up, they ask her to forecast their futures.While answering their questions, Maisey adds a prediction of her own: “Some of us will forgive our dads,” she says, “and some of us won’t.” It’s a measure of the play’s warmth and its positive-minded wisdom that you’ll leave the theater, nonetheless, feeling that most of the characters have grown in some way, and rooting for all of them.

Fathers Crave Forgiveness Amid Culture Clashes in ‘Indian Princesses’

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