I saw Dad Don't Read This a couple of weeks ago, and my immediate thought walking out of the theater was, "Oh, they got this right." I mean the fight you have in your best friend's bedroom over that offhand thing they said about you last week…or the family thing you don't have the words for at 14…or the real, secret reason you don't want to go to the party that everyone else can't wait to go to.
Dad Don't Read This follows four teenage girls in suburban Ohio who gather for a series of sleepovers, where they spend their nights playing The Sims, gossiping, dancing, drinking stolen liquor, and navigating the shifting loyalties of their tight-knit group. Through the stomach-churningly familiar rituals of teenage friendship, playwright Eliya Smith illuminates the private humiliations and unspoken fears that shape adolescence.
What stuck with me days after seeing the show were the performances: sharply calibrated, fully lived in, and remarkably precise. It's not every day you see actors in their late teens and early twenties depict adolescence with this much specificity and emotional precision. The four actors portraying this close-knit group are also incredibly funny, finding comedy in the awkwardness, pettiness, and volatility of teenage friendship without ever undercutting its emotional weight.
We sat down with the show's four performers, Renée-Nicole Powell, Sophie Rossman, Kayta Thomas, and Amalia Yoo, in their dressing room before the show to talk about getting into the headspace of teenage girls at a sleepover, whether theater is cool, and the nightly ritual of dedicating the performance to someone (or, in one case, a fish).
By Katie Kern and Aidan La Poche
Okay, my first question is: my bedroom song is "Latch" by Disclosure. If you're alone in the bedroom, what are you dancing to?
Sophie:
Alone in my bedroom, I'm playing a 2010s pop hits playlist.
Amalia:
Honestly, recently I still love the Audrey Hobert album, or something from Funny Girl, like an old musical. I'll bump Into the Woods really loud and do all the parts, obviously.
Kayta:
Y'all are gonna get me for this one, but I'll blast the K-pop Demon Hunters playlist any day. I love movie soundtracks from really fun, wonderful movies.
Renée-Nicole:
I recently got a CD player, and I've been trying to collect CDs of random music that my Spotify algorithm wouldn't give me. I'll put one on, know one popular song, and then discover everything else. I also love Anna Roxanne—very ethereal music. I'll light candles, roll around, and do floor work. We were talking about that yesterday.
I think a lot of people are probably saying this to you, but this might be one of the most authentic portrayals of young girls being friends that I've seen in a very long time. Is there a piece of art, a book, or a movie
with that teenage bedroom girl aura—that you connect to? Something outside of this play that shares that same feeling or helped you get into character?
Amalia:
I love Justine Kurland's Girl Pictures. I was also looking through the Sofia Coppola Virgin Suicides photo book early in our run, and I remember thinking, "Oh, this is it."
I think the "girl play™" has become this thing where people go, "Oh, it's so cute! It's for girls!" But those photographs are dark and sad, and all of the girls have such complex inner worlds. I looked at them and thought, "This is how this play feels."
You know when actors say, "I put this hairpiece on and finally felt like my character"? Is there something like that for you that gets you into the teenage bedroom?
Kayta:
Before I go onstage, I always do a silly dance—something loosey-goosey and stupid—to remind myself, "Yeah, I'm a kid."
Backstage, it's also become me, Sophie, and Rennee chasing each other around, tickling each other, doing handstands, backflips—Rennee's doing gymnastic routines on the floor. It really helps us tap into that inner child before going on.
Sophie:
Having my hair down in the first scene gives me the impulse to get it off my neck, which makes me feel that awkward teenage physicality.
I also paint my nails every week and add a layer of sparkle. Since I look at my hands so much in the show, it feels really intentional.
Renée-Nicole:
Last run, every day I'd listen to Taylor Swift's "Fifteen." I even put Spotify on private session because I wasn't letting it mess up my Spotify Wrapped. And I had to play my harmonica.
Renée-Nicole:
I remember loving the "Fifteen" music video when I was these girls' age, especially seeing Abigail with the red hair. I'm not a Swiftie, but something about it brought me right back to that time.
Then I'd immediately listen to "Wild Horses" because "Fifteen" made me a little too sad, and I needed to even it out before the show.
Are there any pre-show rituals you have to do before a performance?
Amalia:
We always do a huddle.
Sophie:
A very important huddle.
Amalia:
It's the same every time. We huddle, pat each other's backs, do hip circles, then make up a little song together.
Renée-Nicole:
We always dedicate the show to someone or something. It can be something as small as our fish—we dedicated one show to Derek.
Sophie:
For context, we had a fish in the show. He's alive and doing great.
Has your relationship to your character changed over the course of the run?
Kayta:
I've gained a lot more respect for my character. At first I leaned into making her bigger, but now I've softened into her and let her just be a person.
Amalia:
Our director always wanted us to make the characters our own. That really clicked for me by the end of the last run. And now all of the characters feel much more lived in because we're all so much closer.
Sophie:
Playing a kid gives you permission to follow weird impulses. We've definitely been having more fun this time around.
Something else I thought was so fabulous about this show was that when I saw it, I had the worst stomachache while watching. The conflict in the play made me feel so tense in my body, partly because it reminded me of things I've experienced, but also because of the incredibly realistic way you all inhabit those conflicts with one another. I'm curious, once the show ends each night, how do you let go of that?
Kayta:
I feel like the show's journey just lets us get there. By the end, it's like our characters are finally saying, "Let's just talk." Then it's like, "Oh, well, it's done now."
Renée-Nicole:
The last little bit of the play feels like a cool-down in and of itself. Now, in this version, we have these two light cues that work together, and when that first one happens, I'm just like, "Ah." She's done. Then it clicks again, we get into bows, and for me it's just a complete release. We shake it all off, and we're just happy.
Amalia:
A lot of the time we hit blackout—and we don't have a curtain—but that's kind of how the play feels at the end. You just go, "Ah." Then we do bows, we dance, and we're good.
We also could've spread out in the dressing room, but we all chose the four closest vanities because we didn't want to be separated.
Renée-Nicole:
It's nice coming downstairs and being like, "Oh my God, when we did that..."
Sophie:
It's also a really physically exhausting show. If I'm nervous before the show or nervous about someone in the audience, there's always a dance moment where I can really get that out. It feels like I get to be myself for a second, and then the rest of the show becomes a lot easier.
Kayta:
Every time there's a really big moment of tension, we also have some kind of physical release. After our fight scene, I come downstairs and knit. Amalia taught all of us how to knit, so I just knit until I have to go back onstage. Those little physical rituals throughout the show are really helpful.
One of the things I really love—and I'm not trying to underplay the circumstances in the show—is how inconvenience is kind of portrayed as tragedy. That's so real.
A lot of the time, when people write about the teenage girl experience, they underplay how catastrophic an inconvenience can feel. What this show also does so well is portray that when something feels dramatic at that age, it also amplifies the worst parts of yourself.
So I'm curious, is there an inconvenience, or maybe more of a pet peeve, that really feels like a tragedy in your own life? Maybe when you were a teenager, or even now.
Renée-Nicole:
I've always been like this. I hate when plans change. It's the worst thing for me. If someone says they're coming an hour later than planned, and I'd already imagined my day around that, it completely throws me off.
It can be something really small, like, "Can we do four instead of five?" and I'm like, "Ah, five! I was going to take a nap." Maybe it's just me wanting things to be the way I pictured them. That's definitely something I struggle with.
Sophie:
I can't be late. Ever since we did the reading, everyone has known that's my biggest anxiety.
Being late, especially as a teenager, felt like the biggest thing in the world. I know I need to chill out about it because being five minutes late isn't going to kill me, but I think it comes from that embarrassing feeling of walking into class after it's already started and having to awkwardly sit down. I hate that.
Amalia:
Mine is also about schedules. I'm better about it now because I've really worked on it, but I still deeply relate to that feeling of people not following the schedule you came up with in your own head—even though you never told anyone what it was.
You're like, "Well, this is how today was supposed to go."
That's basically the play, right? "We were going to do this, then this, and it was going to be perfect. Now you're changing it."
When you're in high school, everything else is out of your control, so the little moments you do have control over become everything. When something interrupts that, it feels like the end of the world.
That's actually the part of the play that stayed with me the most—the theme of control.
I think about my middle school self and how badly I wanted to control everything. I'd like to believe I've moved on from that version of myself, but watching the show made me realize it's still there, just buried a little deeper.
I'm curious, after living in the world of this play for so long, how has it affected you? Has it made you reevaluate anything about yourselves?
Kayta:
For me, with Lida, it's really been about self-acceptance.
Growing up as the weird kid—and the weird Black kid—that shapes you. Seeing how much people love Lida’s weirdness and queerness has helped me accept those parts of myself.
Growing up, I always felt like I was this happy, silly kid who was constantly being told to quiet down. Being able to play someone who gets to be exactly that, and seeing audiences connect with her, has been really healing.
I also think every character in this play reflects something back to people. Watching audiences see themselves in all of these girls and love them anyway is really beautiful.
Amalia:
Yeah, it's been really healing.
We've spent so much time talking about what it was like to be this age, and you realize how similar all of our experiences were.
Then you watch audiences root for these girls at some of the hardest moments of their lives. They still love them, they still accept them, and they still hope for them.
That's really healing because all the parts of these girls that I relate to remind me that it was okay to feel those things. That younger version of myself deserved that same compassion.
Okay, last question. Is theater cool?
I feel like when you invite people our age to a play, it's still not automatically, "Oh, cool." If it's a movie or a short film, people get excited. But with theater it's still, "Oh, cool... it's a New York Times Critic's Pick, I guess I'll go."
To me, this show is so cool. It feels like something people could be talking about it. So, make the case for theater. What's your relationship to that?
Renée-Nicole:
I think shows like this are pushing us in the right direction and bringing people in who might never have seen a play otherwise. We were literally talking about this backstage. It's funny because theater kind of reverted the other way, but now it's actually the best thing ever. It's almost become this "if you know, you know" thing, which is inherently cool.
You're sitting down for ninety minutes and agreeing to play pretend. You're suspending disbelief and watching these people in front of you, believing them completely, and letting it affect you however it does.
There's something so intimate and raw and organic about live performance, especially theater. It's this perfectly crafted story that you experience in real time, and afterward you can think about it forever, but you can't really go back to it. You leave with the memory of it, almost like a dream.
Amalia:
I agree with everything Renée said.
I also think most people who make theater don't really care if it's cool or not. No matter where it falls on the cool scale, we'll always be doing theater because it's so hard, and we love it so much.
I think that's kind of the coolest thing about it. No matter how many people are in the audience, we'd still be making it. And if people come and love it, even better.
So theater is punk rock.
Amalia:
Yeah. It's not punk if you say it's punk. You can't call yourself punk—that's not punk.
Sophie:
I think theater feels private and public at the same time. You're having something that feels deeply personal while sitting in a room full of people who are all having their own private experience, too.
There's such a sense of community in that. It's the same kind of excitement you get from going to a concert or another live performance.
There's also risk. What if something goes wrong? There's danger. Theater is cool because it's dangerous.
Kayta:
I feel like we're watching a shift in the way theater is marketed.
Whether it's bringing someone like Megan Thee Stallion into theater or finding new ways to reach audiences, it's opening the door for people who maybe never thought they'd go see a play.
We're so attached to our phones, and people are looking for ways to live more analog lives again.
People crave simplicity and theater reminds us of that and gives us a chance to experience something with our physical bodies, within a community, and be removed from chaos and technology.
I think that's why it's having such an interesting cultural moment.
I think that's a beautiful way to end. We love the show so much. Thank you all for taking the time to talk with us.