What An Unassuming Play Gets Right About Letting Kids Be Kids

     Not too long ago, I found myself in New York City. As much as I wanted to walk around and ask people what is it like to have a committed socialist/communist mayor (and trust me, I thought about it), instead, I stayed focused and I walked into the stage production of Indian Princesses at the Atlantic Theater Company on the advice of a friend. I expected to leave the theater very frustrated. I was anticipating another off-Broadway production rehearsing familiar claims about the past and slotting everything neatly into the language of identity. The play revisits the old YMCA father-daughter program that borrowed, often awkwardly, from Native American imagery and trials. Given the current cultural script, I assumed I knew where this was going: appropriation, confusion, and a tidy, annoying moral about the hidden damage of suburban American life.

    All that said, I walked out pleasantly surprised. And, more than that, grateful. Not because the criticisms are wrong. Some of the YMCA rituals were more than cringeworthy. The faux-tribal language and costumes reflected a real carelessness about Native Identity. The play does not deny that. But that is not where the show settles. The play is interested in something harder to capture: What happens when young people are given enough space to work things out together?

    Each of the girls carries something: Family strain, identity questions, the ordinary instability of adolescence layered onto more complicated circumstances. What is striking is not the presence of tension but how it resolves. 

    Adults try to narrate the girl’s experience, and for some there are therapeutic referees. But instead, the girls reject the adult framing and lean on each other. They talk. They get things wrong. They hurt each other. They repair. Slowly, unevenly, they move toward understanding, not because they have been instructed to, but because they are allowed to.

    The 2008 setting matters more than it first appears. No phones. No algorithm pre-sorting them into categories before they have figured out who they are. Disagreement happens face-to-face, and it has to go somewhere. That is not nostalgia. It is a condition of possibility. You can feel how much harder that kind of interaction has become.

    I kept thinking: This is what college used to feel like. Not idealized. Not always comfortable. But open. You tried on ideas. You met people who made no sense to you...and maybe still don’t! You said things you later regretted. And you learned through conversation, embarrassment, disagreement, and friendship. Not every awkward moment was treated as harm. Not every tension required institutional interpretations.

    There was a kind of freedom in that, and a quiet expectation of resilience. It assumed something about young people: that they could absorb friction without breaking, and that meaning often emerges on the other side of discomfort rather than before it.

    We have drifted from…no, that's the wrong word. We haven’t drifted, we have run away from that posture. We narrate too much, too quickly. We frame experiences before young people have had a chance to interpret them. The language of harm, identity, and safety arrives preloaded into every interaction. The result is not clarity but a kind of ambient fragility. Ordinary human complexity becomes harder to process because it is constantly translated into something else. 

    What Indian Princesses does, quietly, and almost stubbornly, is refuse that translation. It trusts its characters. It allows them to be messy without turning them into case studies. It allows growth without converting it into activism or pathology. And it trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than resolve every tension into a single lesson.

    The fathers are drawn with the same restraint. They are awkward, imperfect, occasionally oblivious. But they are trying: building campfires, inventing rituals, making fools of themselves in the service of connection. It is easy, from a distance, to read those efforts through the language of power and misappropriation. But there was nothing malicious in them, whatever the cultural register became later.

    One reviewer described the girls as existing “before the world comes crashing in.” That is not only a great line, but it is overwhelmingly correct. What the play suggests, without sermonizing, is that the crash sometimes comes from adults who insist on over-interpreting every moment before it has had a chance to unfold.

    There is something quietly anti-fragile in the world the play depicts. The girls are not shielded from discomfort. They encounter it, sit with it, and gradually learn to move through it. That is how maturity actually forms: through friction, conversation, and time.

    The original YMCA program, for all its flaws, belonged to a broader ecosystem of voluntary, intergenerational associations that once did real civic work. They were imperfect institutions, but formative ones. They created shared experiences across lines of difference, however clumsily; for boys and girls. Unfortunately, we have been better at dismantling them than at replacing them.

    What stayed with me was not a political argument (which I somewhat expected when I first sat down) but a simple observation: Left alone long enough, people often find ways to understand one another. Young people, especially, are more capable than we give them credit for, and I see this regularly at the golf club and in my neighborhood. 

    Friendship still matters. Face-to-face conversation still matters. And sometimes the most responsible thing adults can do is step back, just enough, and let it happen. I type that previous sentence and I think to myself that it should not feel like a controversial claim. However, right now, and in this time...it does.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com