Some background:  for those of you who are childless and out-of-touch with middle and upper class girl culture in the United States, there is a particular commercial phenomenon known as The American Girls.   The American Girls began in 1986 when Pleasant Rowland created a series of dolls based on important historical time periods in U.S. history.  Each doll had a series of books which explained the girl's time period and what life was like.  In 1998, the company was sold to Mattel.  Somewhere in between its inception and the present, the venture lost its soul.  Today, every new catalog has a "new" girl.  There are more accessories than parents have bank accounts.  And, if you dare to enter one of the flagship stores in New York or Chicago, you will have the overwhelming sense that at least at Disney you get some free entertainment.  At the American Girls store, the floors are dripping with sticky-octopus like tentacles of attractively packaged must haves that suck you in and hold you hostage until you hand over your credit card.  You can buy new outfits for your dolls.  You can have tea with them.  You can have their hair done at the salon.  You can buy furniture for them.  You can buy matching outfits so that doll owner and doll look exactly alike.  Freakishly, you can design a doll of your own making exactly to your specifications (you are encouraged to make it look like you)--call it "practice for in vitro genetic manipulation in the upper class mommy future".  And, of course, you can buy new dolls.  Here, I will also offer my positive commentary that The American Girls catalog is a multicultural dream (with the exception of class differences--you have to have enough money to buy the dolls!):  with dolls in wheelchairs, dolls of every possible ethnic and racial background, and dolls that you can construct yourself, the America Girls collection goes far beyond a white-washed vision of upper class America.  (Too bad multiculturalism isn't that well practiced or received in the actual school yards and slumber parties across the U.S.)

Each doll has an owner who sings about its story while the other girls help to act out the story of fleeing from the political or natural disaster that caused the exile.  You really haven't lived until you've seen the Indonesian tsunami told as part of the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" song. 

Throughout the narrative, the girls begin to make comparisons between their refugees and Rita and Katrina.  The play ends in a glorious finale where the girls decide that they could be the Refugee Girls of 2008.  And, of course, the audience is encouraged, in true American Girls doll fashion, to "Buy, Buy, Buy," the musical number that closes the show.