Review: Camping, a Romantic Tragedy

Ari and Brit are close—so close that they lose their virginity together at the age of 15 in the same camping tent, to the same guy, using the same condom. In her post-coital clarity, Ari frets, “What if he tells everyone at school we had a threesome?” The reason they were so eager to have sex with this dude in the first place was to quiet the nasty whispers going around their small-town Ohio high school—that these two best friends are secretly lovers. Have they inadvertently reinforced that notion with this shared sexual experience? Brit begins to panic.

It’s the first of many such freak-outs in Victoria Lynne Barclay’s Camping, now making its world premiere with Colt Coeur at HERE. A flawlessly acted two-hander that examines the relationship between two women over the course of 25 years, it is the must-see drama playing in New York this Pride month.

Barclay shows us Ari (Colby Minifie) and Brit (Alice Kremelberg) at different stages of life between the ages of 15 and 40. We see how their friendship changes as Ari goes away to Ohio University and falls into a circle of rich out-of-staters, and how Brit feels that they look down on her as Ari’s “redneck trailer trash friend” when all converge at a music festival the summer before Ari’s senior year.

But Ari and Brit still share the same old borrowed tent from the first scene, a sanctuary for unspoken longing and unrealized possibility. It is the refuge where, as both are coming down from molly, Ari articulates a horrifying vision of their future: “We’ll marry two boys from high school! Doesn’t fucking matter who… They’re a bunch of fucking clones with the same fade, jeans, and Carhartt hats. Will we beg one of the clones to realize we’re not the same weirdos from high school anymore and please, please fuck us enough until we’re pregnant and, and, and, trapped? Because we certainly won’t be fucking them because we actually like it will we?”

Minifie delivers this line with the passion of Atticus Finch making his closing argument. It’s a Hail Mary play to jolt her friend, the person she loves more than anyone in the world, out of complacency so that they might imagine an alternative future together. And just like Atticus, it’s not enough to overcome the gravitational pull of American destiny.

In Kremelberg’s haunted gaze we see the awful weight of expectation—the same heaviness that convinced Brit she had to lose her virginity in the first scene so that everyone might have proof she is heterosexual. It’s the heaviness that teaches these women from an early age not to expect sex to be pleasurable, and that men must be handled delicately lest they become violent (the matter-of-fact nature with which they discuss these topics is both disturbing and all too real). Ari might alleviate that burden temporarily, in the privacy of the tent, but it all comes crashing down with every flinch.

Minifie and Kremelberg give bracingly dynamic performances under Adrienne Campbell-Holt’s sensitive and exacting direction, convincingly aging 25 years in just 85 minutes and showing us how a lack of extraordinary bravery and imagination (good luck finding that in a Scioto County trailer park) can land anyone in a life they never really wanted.

Krit Robinson’s scenic design utilizes the cave-like intimacy of the downstairs theater at HERE to invite us into the tent, silent witnesses to this decades-long dance. We clock the passage of time and class through Sarita P. Fellows’s subtle but legible costume design, with Ari trading in her daisy dukes for mom jeans. We can clearly see that the two women inhabit different worlds by the end of the play, but is their connection still strong enough to hold them together?

Salvador Zamora’s sound design offers us the only indication of the world beyond the tent (there are multiple realistic rainstorms). And Vittoria Orlando’s lighting hits that sweet spot of moody dimness that does not obscure the actors’ faces. We can always see that Brit is seriously considering the lifeline Ari is offering her—right before she turns away and changes the subject.

It all felt depressingly real to this Ohio native, who has known plenty of women who have fallen into lives of quiet regret not so much from the choices they have made as the ones they have consented to let others make for them. Camping is their tragedy, a shattering off-Broadway debut from a playwright to watch.