The YMCA’s “Indian Princesses” program—rebranded in recent years as “Adventure Princesses”—bills itself as wholesome father-daughter bonding through Native-inspired activities. Playwright Eliana Theologides Rodriguez knows better. Her grandmother and great-grandmother were forced through assimilation schools designed to sever Indigenous families from their heritage, language, and identity. What the YMCA packages as “family fun” is cultural appropriation built on the machinery of genocide. Rodriguez’s searing, unexpectedly funny “Indian Princesses,” now receiving its Off-Broadway premiere at Atlantic Theater Company in a co-production with Rattlestick Theater, asks a question that extends far beyond one cheerful program: How does colonization continue through institutions that claim to honor what they’re erasing?

Set in the summer of 2008—that brief, delusional moment when America convinced itself it had achieved “post-racial” enlightenment on the eve of Obama’s election—the play follows five pre-adolescent girls of color and their well-meaning white fathers through a YMCA program steeped in appropriation. The fathers believe they’re teaching their daughters about heritage, community, and diversity. They’re actually teaching them erasure. The girls know this instinctively, even when they lack the language to name it. When the adults fail them—and they all fail, each in their own painful way—the girls create their own ritual, their own meaning, their own magic in the clearing behind the YMCA where nobody is watching.

Director Miranda Cornell (making her Off-Broadway debut alongside Rodriguez) opens with Chief Glen (Frank Wood) explaining the program’s origin story: a benevolent traveler and an Indian man teaming up in 1492 to create father-daughter bonding activities. The girls immediately poke holes in the mythology. “How did they speak the same language?” “Did the traveler learn Indian?” Glen fumbles through answers about English being “more useful” while Chris (Greg Keller) keeps correcting him: “Spanish. Christopher Columbus came from Spain.” The scene is played for comedy, but the horror accumulates: Glen genuinely believes he’s teaching diversity while peddling colonial fantasy.

The play alternates between group YMCA sessions—complete with canoe paddles, feather headbands, and cringe-inducing chants—and intimate scenes where the girls try to make sense of what they’re experiencing. Rodriguez structures the narrative around “Homework Conversations” where each father attempts to discuss race, heritage, and identity with his daughter. Every conversation is a different flavor of failure. Wayne (Pete Simpson) tells his adopted Black daughter Maisey that he and his wife “don’t see ‘black,’ or white or purple! We just see our daughter.” Maisey asks quietly: “why do you look sad when I say that?” Mac (Ben Beckley) refuses to discuss his late wife’s Mexican heritage with their daughter Andi, insisting “Past is the past. You’re a human. I’m a human.” Chris lectures his Yaqui and Tewa stepdaughters Lily and Hazel about “transracial parenting” while demanding they teach him about racism: “Who am I? I’m just a white guy!” Glen assures his granddaughter Samantha that “as long as you have Jesus in your heart, you can never truly be racist.”

The young actresses convey pre-adolescent confusion and identity struggle without ever feeling like adults playing children. Of the five, Rebecca Jimenez (Andi), Lark White (Maisey), and Haley Wong (Samantha) deliver particularly striking performances.

Jimenez’s Andi is grieving her mother’s recent death while desperately seeking connection to her Latinx ancestry. Mac thinks discussing the past dishonors the present; Andi knows the past is all she has left of who she is. When she finally tries to explain her longing to understand her Mexican heritage, Mac shuts her down in front of the group. Jimenez captures the specific confusion of a twelve-year-old who knows something is wrong but lacks the vocabulary to name it.

Lark White’s Maisey is the play’s spiritual center. When adults withhold information about her origins, she creates elaborate mythology: her birth mother was a demigod daughter of Poseidon, her father a wizard with an invisibility cloak who attended Hogwarts. The story is absurd, hilarious, and heartbreaking—a child filling the silence with magic because nobody will give her truth. White plays Maisey’s creativity and pain simultaneously; when she later performs divination for her friends using rocks and grass, we understand she’s been the healer all along.

Wong’s Samantha develops a compulsive tic—thumping her chest repeatedly—to atone for “bad thoughts.” Glen’s rigid faith framework has convinced his granddaughter that anger is sin, that questioning is a foothold for the devil. In the play’s most devastating scene, Samantha explodes at her grandfather: “I’M PRAYING ALL THE TIME. All my thoughts are bad or praying but I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.” Wong makes visible the toll of Glen’s theology: a nine-year-old girl trapped between thought and confession, unable to exist outside constant atonement.

Anissa Marie Griego (Lily) and Serenity Mariana (Hazel) play sisters with actual Native American heritage—the only girls in the program with genuine connection to the culture being appropriated. Lily is in therapy for “anger issues.” Chris believes he’s helping by putting her in treatment; what he can’t see is that her anger is the appropriate response to erasure. When the Buffalo Besties—a rival, all-white YMCA tribe—tell Lily she can never play Penny in “Hairspray” because “the whole point is that she’s white,” Griego lets us see a girl realizing that no space is safe, not even theater, not even childhood. Mariana’s Hazel is younger, more willing to believe the adults know what they’re doing, which makes her confusion more painful. When she asks Chris about their heritage, he responds with a monologue about his own learning journey. She walks away to watch iCarly.

The fathers are uniformly well-meaning and uniformly failing. Frank Wood brings his Tony-winning craft to Glen, a man so invested in his diversity initiative that he never listens to the girls it’s supposed to serve. When Samantha asks how God hears thoughts, Glen recites Scripture; when she reveals her compulsive atonement, he grabs her to make her stop. Wood makes Glen’s obliviousness painful rather than comic—this is a man who genuinely believes Jesus in the heart prevents racism while running a program built on colonial fantasy.

Greg Keller’s Chris is the “woke” dad who’s read all the books on transracial parenting, done nonprofit work in Peru, and won’t stop explaining his own enlightenment. Keller captures the particular violence of performative anti-racism: Chris claims he wants to learn from the girls, but he never actually listens. When the YMCA talent show devolves into chaos, Chris tries to school Mac and Wayne on their failures while his own stepdaughter stands silently, furious, unheard.

Pete Simpson’s Wayne and Ben Beckley’s Mac represent different forms of avoidance. Wayne’s colorblindness (“we don’t see black or white, just Maisey”) means Maisey must navigate the world without tools to name what she experiences. Mac’s refusal to discuss his late wife’s heritage leaves Andi orphaned from half her identity. Both actors avoid caricature; these are men genuinely trying to protect their daughters by avoiding pain, not understanding that silence is its own violence. 

Emmie Finckel’s scenic design creates a realistic YMCA meeting room with folding chairs that transforms fluidly—the room slides to the background, a stage with curtain moves forward, and a grassy clearing appears where the girls gather without adult supervision. The clearing is where the play’s heart lives, where the girls can be honest, angry, confused, and finally, magical.

Mextly Couzin’s lighting moves from fluorescent institutional brightness in the YMCA scenes to intimate spotlighting in the clearing, with effective blackouts marking the girls’ emotional transitions. Sarafina Bush’s costumes and the props—canoe paddles, feather headbands, dreamcatchers—are appropriately, uncomfortably detailed, making visible the program’s casual theft of sacred symbols.

Miranda Cornell directs with remarkable tonal control, balancing razor-sharp satire with genuine tenderness. The YMCA scenes are often hilarious—Glen’s mangled Columbus myth, the fathers’ painful “Homework Conversations,” the girls’ deadpan reactions to adult nonsense. But Cornell never lets the humor excuse the harm. When Lily explodes at Chris—”You think I don’t know I can’t be Penny?! You think I don’t know I’m different?!”—the laughter stops. Cornell understands that these girls are funny because they’re smarter than the adults, and they’re in pain because the adults won’t listen.

The play builds to an extraordinary final sequence. After the talent show disaster, the girls sneak away from their homes and gather in the clearing. Maisey—who has been creating mythology all along—performs divination using rocks, grass, and leaves arranged in ritual patterns. One by one, the girls ask about their futures. Will Lily make it to Broadway? Definitely. Will they be friends forever? No, but they’ll remember each other always. Will Samantha’s thoughts condemn her? No. The ritual is partially magic, partially play, entirely theirs.

Each girl has developed her own movement vocabulary—geometric patterns, rhythmic sounds, chest-thumping, wordless vocalizations. Rodriguez’s stage directions indicate these aren’t choreographed precisely but should “capture the magical abandon of childhood.” Cornell stages this beautifully: the girls release their hurt through movement that looks nothing like YMCA-approved “Indian” activities. They’re not performing culture; they’re creating it.

The fathers arrive to bring the girls home, but Wayne stops them: “Shhh… Look.” The men witness their daughters in the midst of a ritual all their own. For once, the adults are silent. For once, they watch without explaining, correcting, or appropriating. It’s the only moment in the play where the fathers get it right.

“Indian Princesses” operates on multiple levels simultaneously. On the surface, it’s about one misguided YMCA program in 2008. Beneath that, it’s about the ongoing machinery of cultural genocide—how the same institutions that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families, forbade them to speak their languages, and subjected them to systematic abuse now package that theft as wholesome family entertainment. The residential schools that operated in Canada and the United States under the banner of “Kill the Indian, save the man” didn’t end their work; they just rebranded. The YMCA’s “Indian Princesses” program is colonization with a smile, appropriation as bonding activity, erasure as diversity initiative.

But Rodriguez’s genius is recognizing that the YMCA program is a trope for something larger: how any dominant culture digests, sanitizes, and sells back the cultures it has worked to destroy. Glen genuinely believes he’s honoring Indigenous heritage by teaching fake origin stories about benevolent Columbus. Chris genuinely believes he’s supporting his stepdaughters’ identity by demanding they educate him. Wayne genuinely believes colorblindness protects Maisey from racism. Mac genuinely believes silence protects Andi from grief. These men aren’t monsters; they’re well-meaning participants in systems designed to erase difference while claiming to celebrate it.

The play asks uncomfortable questions about complicity and intention. Is Glen responsible for the harm his program causes when he believes he’s doing good? Are Chris’s “anti-racist” performances better or worse than Mac’s silence? What does it mean when the only Indigenous girls in an “Indian Princess” program are pathologized (Lily in therapy for anger) while white girls play Indian without consequence? How do children survive when the adults meant to guide them are themselves lost?

Rodriguez also interrogates the specific violence of 2008’s “post-racial” fantasy. This is the summer America convinced itself that electing a Black president would solve racism, that diversity initiatives and good intentions could paper over centuries of genocide. The girls know better. They know that no amount of canoe paddles and dreamcatchers will answer Andi’s questions about her Mexican grandmother. They know that Chris’s extensive reading on transracial parenting means nothing if he won’t listen. They know that Glen’s Jesus-in-the-heart theology won’t stop Samantha’s compulsive guilt. They know what the adults won’t admit: that systems built on erasure cannot honor what they’ve erased, no matter how cheerfully they rebrand.

The play’s most profound question emerges in its final image: What do children create when adults fail them? The girls’ ritual in the clearing isn’t borrowed or appropriated; it’s invented, collaborative, theirs. Maisey’s divination offers real comfort—not because magic rocks predict the future but because the girls have created meaning together in a space where nobody is performing culture for adult approval. They’ve built something authentic out of the rubble of institutional failure.

This raises a deeper question about resilience and responsibility. Should we celebrate the girls’ ability to create beauty despite adult failure? Or should we demand that adults do better so children don’t have to heal themselves? Rodriguez refuses to choose. The ritual is gorgeous and necessary and shouldn’t have to exist. The girls are brilliant and creative and shouldn’t have to be their own guides. The play honors their resilience while indicting the systems that require it.

“Indian Princesses” is essential theater—funny, painful, and uncommonly wise about how colonization operates through institutions that claim progressive values. Rodriguez has written a play that works as sharp satire, intimate character study, and devastating cultural critique simultaneously. That it manages all three while maintaining the specific rhythms of pre-adolescent speech and the awkward comedy of well-meaning failure is remarkable.

The performances are uniformly excellent, with the young actresses delivering work that never feels precocious or performed. They sound like actual eleven-year-olds trying to make sense of a world that won’t explain itself, and that authenticity makes the play’s critique land with precision. The adult actors resist caricature; these fathers are recognizable, which makes their failures more damning.

Cornell’s direction honors both the play’s humor and its rage. She understands that these girls are hilarious because they’re smarter than the adults, and heartbreaking because the adults won’t listen. The pacing never sags across the play’s nearly two-hour runtime, and the final ritual sequence is staged with the kind of theatrical magic that reminds you why live performance matters.

This is a play about cultural appropriation, yes. But it’s also about the particular violence of good intentions, the resilience required of children when systems fail them, and the difference between performing culture and creating it. It asks hard questions about who gets to tell origin stories, who benefits from diversity initiatives, and what children lose when adults prioritize their own comfort over honest engagement with pain.

Rodriguez has written a play that will make you laugh at Glen’s mangled mythology and Chris’s performative wokeness, then make you sit with the knowledge that these aren’t aberrations—they’re how colonization continues. The 2008 setting feels both specific and universal; we’re still living in the aftermath of that “post-racial” delusion, still building programs that claim to honor what they’re erasing.

See this play. Bring your discomfort. Watch these brilliant young actresses navigate a world that won’t give them language for their own experience. Watch them create ritual and meaning in the clearing when the adults aren’t watching. And ask yourself: What systems am I participating in that claim to honor what they’re designed to erase?