In ‘Dad Don’t Read This,’ the playwright forces the theatergoing public to confront the chilling, civilization-ending reality of a teenager who feels vaguely weird about moving out.
One must ask, when confronting the sprawling, aggressively mundane terror of Eliya Smith’s new dramedy 'Dad Don’t Read This', whether the very architecture of the proscenium was built solely to house the crushing weight of a young woman not entirely sure if she wants to attend a state university or take a gap year. Smith, thrusting her audience into the bleak, unforgiving liminal space of an upper-middle-class bedroom adorned with strategically placed fairy lights, achieves a kind of weaponized narcissism rarely seen outside the more self-indulgent passages of Goethe’s 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'; though where Werther possessed the narrative decency to ultimately shoot himself, Smith’s protagonist merely stares at her own reflection in a darkened iPhone screen for forty uninterrupted minutes, forcing the spectator to reckon with the horrifying, paralyzing possibility that adulthood might simply be a bit tedious.
The pacing is a deliberate, hostile act of endurance, a directorial choice that clearly echoes the suffocating inertia of Jerzy Grotowski’s notoriously punishing 1974 experimental mime cycle 'Próżnia', yet one cannot help but also note a distinctly frantic, repetitive desperation in the protagonist's pacing that recalls nothing so much as the 1992 educational software 'Mario Teaches Typing'; for in both works, the captive observer is subjected to a relentless, unyielding demand for attention while the primary figure remains fundamentally trapped in a loop of their own making, entirely unable to progress beyond the most basic, foundational keystrokes of human experience without demanding constant, unearned validation from an external authority.
Smith has dared to ask what would happen if a teenager felt somewhat ambivalent on a Tuesday, and the resulting shockwaves have rendered all previous theatrical explorations of human suffering entirely obsolete.
The audience, presumably lacking the rigorous phenomenological grounding required to fully appreciate a second-act soliloquy concerning the protagonist's fading, tragic interest in a local barista’s Instagram story, is left entirely defenseless against Smith’s staggering revelation that growing up is accompanied by a vague, generalized confusion about the future. It is a terrifying, devastating triumph of the modern theater, a sprawling testament to the absolute limits of human endurance; a play that definitively proves our collective cultural inheritance has finally, exhaustedly culminated in a nineteen-year-old asking her mother to please, for the love of God, just knock before coming in.