Being a teenager, for anyone coming of age after the invention of the personal computer, has involved spending a significant amount of time in an alternate reality. Kids have always had their fantasy realms — Narnia, Peter Pan, any number of other children’s classics — but it’s new, at least, for those areas of interest to be standardized and digitized, open (to an extent) to user input, and near-infinite in playability. You can spend years in the world of a video game, precisely because it gives you both wide-open roads and a set of guardrails. In The Sims, for instance, you can customize humanlike characters and puppeteer them through vast permutations of life choices and relationships, creating a digital world that resembles something like our own, except with the clear cause and effect that human life lacks. “Sim ambition is entirely logical. The sim wants something, the sim works toward that goal,” a 16-and-a-half-year-old girl named Mal explains in her diary in Eliya Smith’s beguiling play Dad Don’t Read This, “I love this feature, ’cause, like, Hilda would never say she is going to study, and then play Sims all day, to select a random example.”

Hilda is Mal’s favorite character in The Sims, and Mal keeps spending time with her because Mal is in the midst of a classic period of teenage retreat from the self. Her general mood may be familiar to anyone who had a dark period around age 16, especially so if you grew up in the 2010s and found yourself avoiding the drama of high school by clicking through the easier-to-parse world of a video game. (MMORPGs were my opiate of choice, but I appreciate playwrights’ eternal fondness for the Sims franchise; Dad Don’t Read This would make a good companion with Celine Song’s Simlish Seagull.) Smith’s play puts her audience in the position of trying to pry Mal open from several different angles. First, we see Mal (Amalia Yoo, exceptionally good at conveying the racing inner monologue and physical awkwardness of a teenage girl, no surprise if you saw her in John Proctor Is the Villain) reading from her diary, in which, as in the play’s title, she writes secrets she’d prefer for her father not to know, mostly about how “I don’t want to go on a walk with you. I want to sit in my room and play Sims.” Then, in a burst of frenetic energy, we meet Mal’s friends Sophie (Sophie Rossman), Noelle (Renée-Nicole Powell), and Lida (Kayta Thomas), who like to hang out at her house for sleepovers where they try swigs of illicit alcohol, gossip about their classmates, and tend to alternate-reality Sim-selves. (They are reckoning with the concept of sex and, like most Sims players, obsessed with making their characters “WooHoo” with the men of their neighborhood.) A couple of years ago, Smith wrote delicately about loss and adolescence in Grief Camp. Here she captures the murmurations of a flock of awkward teenagers through what feel like overlapping run-on sentences, each girl bursting with something to express that she can’t quite put into words. Sophie has become a magnet for unwanted and creepy attention from men; Lida is beset by physical awkwardness (which Thomas expresses through a showstopping dance break) and inchoate, seemingly queer desire; Noelle is stuck caring for her friend Mal while knowing she could cut her off and just hang with cooler girls.

There’s an elastic tension in the way that a character like Mal wants to confess, wants to share in community, and also wants to disappear, a situation that tugs at her relationships with her friends and with the audience. You want her to explain herself to you, as any good character in a play should, and yet Mal is a person who’d simply rather not. (Additionally, Dad Don’t Read This did make me wonder which other characters from the canon would get hooked on video games. Bartleby the Scrivener, probably; Hamlet, definitely.) Yoo is incredibly expressive and alive in the moment as an actor — I watched her face flicker through a whole spectrum of emotions in a scene where Mal listens the other girls describe a party she wasn’t at — and so when Mal disconnects from the world around her, you feel that absence all the more. Where is Mal going when she absents herself from her school, her homelife, and the rest of the friend group? Smith presents some possible answers — traumas that may be affecting her, or the possibility that her depression is mundane — but she doesn’t want to solve her like a mystery, which is both true to the character and presents a dramatic problem the last third of the play can’t quite navigate. Dad Don’t Read This resolves, in many ways, but there’s an unfilled spot left at its center. Amid the warmth and humor of her portrait of teenagehood, Smith is touching on a cold and bracing thing. Sometimes, people, like pixels, can just flicker out.