Camping is the most American of summer activities, the tent a symbol of our pioneering spirit, family adventures, adolescent bonding, adult escape. For Ari and Brit, their tent is simultaneously a place of refuge and frustration, and they never leave it. It’s the only setting in “Camping,” Victoria Lynne Barclay’s sad, well-observed play about thwarted love between the two women over the course of 25 years.
At age 15, Ari (Colby Minifie) steals the tent from her brother so that she and Brit (Alice Kremelberg) have a place to meet up with two boys. They are intent on losing their virginity, embarrassed that they are the last girls left in their rural Ohio high school. The conversation between the two teenage girls is comically frank. Their encounter (which we don’t see) is disappointing and somewhat panic-inducing. We learn that only one of the boys shows up. “We should have rescheduled,” Ari says. She also worries that he’ll tell everyone at school we had a threesome.
Brit: But we didn’t.
Ari: Well I mean we kind of did.
Brit: I went outside.
Ari: Yeah but I mean same condom.
Brit: He only had one!
From the start, we’re clued into their attraction to one another, and the fear that people will find out.
At age 18, they use the tent again when they are Girl Scout counselors together, and Ari lets on that she is going to leave town to go to college, which makes Brit feel abandoned; and again at age 22 to attend a music festival, when Brit feels rejected by Ari’s rich college friends; and again at age 30, when they have separate lives and children, which they’re taking camping on July 4th.
At each encounter – there are two more, at age 35 and 40 – much has changed in their lives and their attitudes, but two things remain consistent: their largely repressed attraction to one another, and the exact same tent. Both of these, to be frank, start to feel over-used.
“Why didn’t you give your brother his tent back?” Brit asks.
“It’s the only place in my life where anything exciting has ever happened,” Ari says.
That might be the saddest line in the play.
If “Camping” seems almost as much of a downer as “Brokeback Mountain” (without the graphic sex scenes), it is ably performed and directed. This first play by Barclay reveals a playwright with an ear for authentic-sounding and amusing dialogue, especially in the early scenes, and a modicum of kindness towards her characters that allows them at least to imagine a happy ending:
“I need you so much I used to think it was physical pain,” Brit tells Ari. “But I realized when I got older that it wasn’t pain at all. It was building. It was something building in me.A firework begging to finally go off.”
Camping
Colt Coeur at Here Arts Center through July 11
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Tickets: $10.50 to $126
Written by Victoria Lynne Barclay, Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt
Scenic design by Krit Robinson, costume design by Sarita P. Fellows, lighting design by Vittoria Orlando, sound design by Salvador Zamora, props design by Thomas Jenkeleit
Cast: Alice Kremelberg as Brit and Colby Minifie as Ari
