The Rhetorical Review

Ogden, UT — The Utah premiere of The Grown-Ups, directed by Jenny Kokai and produced by Sisyphus Happy Theatre Presents in collaboration with a cast and creative team from Weber State University, invites its audience into the dim glow of a real outdoor campfire—and into a fictional spiraling world on the brink of collapse. Written by Skylar Fox and Simon Henriques, this immersive play doesn’t shout its apocalypse. It whispers it, simmers it, slowly smokes it into your clothes and memory.

Performed in a backyard setting generously offered by community members Alice Mulder and Charles Smith, the production embraces the play’s core conceit: a group of young summer camp counselors begin to unravel as the outside world falls apart.

The Grown-Ups, set at a summer camp called Indigo Woods, follows a group of young adult counselors navigating an increasingly surreal and dangerous world. While their days are filled with traditional camp activities and childhood rituals—like roasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories—their nights take a darker turn. As the counselors retrieve their phones from the assistant camp director Aidan, they confront alarming news updates that hint at a bizarre and escalating national crisis—possibly a civil war triggered by a viral image of a pineapple that some claim resembles Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The counselors struggle with how much to reveal to the kids, weighing the value of preserving innocence against the need for preparedness. Cassie, a newcomer and the only non-white counselor, challenges the group’s blind loyalty to outdated and exclusionary camp traditions, asking whether it’s more important to do things the way they’ve always been done or to care better for the children. Many of the camp’s long-standing customs come under scrutiny—not just for being outdated, but for being racially insensitive or unfairly biased, such as the use of an Indigenous name for a predominantly white camp or traditions that privileged boys and older campers. And as it turns out, there are quite a few of those.

“I guess it’s just a question of what you care about more…Taking the best care of these kids that you can? Or doing things the way you’ve always done them.”

—Cassie (Mariana Villarreal)

Context: Playwrights and Play

Written by Skylar Fox and Simon Henriques, The Grown-Ups is an arresting, genre-defying theatrical experience that invites its audience to sit around a literal campfire as five summer counselors confront an ambiguous societal collapse. First produced in a secret Brooklyn backyard during the height of pandemic-era uncertainty, the play rejects spectacle in favor of immersive intimacy, asking urgent questions about power, control, and community with a disarming quietness. Its slow unraveling mirrors the emotional and moral ambiguities of adulthood itself, making it both timely and timeless.

Both Fox and Henriques are the co-artistic directors of Nightdrive, a Brooklyn-based experimental theatre collective known for creating “impossible plays in impossible spaces.” Their past collaborations include Alien Nation (a live immersive alien movie), Providence, RI (a five-dimensional community meeting complete with a pancake breakfast cooked onstage), Thank You Sorry (a haunted rock concert), and Apathy Boy (a hybrid comic book with interactive animation). These productions challenge traditional theatrical boundaries by fusing storytelling with participatory design, digital elements, and site-specific immersion.

Genesis of The Grown-Ups

Fox, an Obie Award–winning director, writer, and magic designer, brings to the project a wide-ranging aesthetic that spans from Broadway (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Fat Ham) to subversive downtown theatre. His work often explores vulnerability, illusion, and emotional rupture through formally ambitious staging. Simon Henriques, also an accomplished performer and playwright, complements this with sharp, self-aware writing that balances humor with existential dread. A semifinalist for the Relentless Award and a resident artist with Ars Nova and Pipeline Theatre, Henriques has also published with McSweeney’s and served as staff writer for Project Sing Out!, a Webby Award–honored benefit production.

Together, Fox and Henriques craft worlds where the familiar becomes uncanny and where intimacy is used not to comfort but to provoke. In The Grown-Ups, their talents converge to produce a theatrical experience that is at once campfire story and political allegory—a quiet, immersive confrontation with what it means to be left in charge when the grown-ups are gone.

During its original pandemic production, The Grown-Ups offered a rare, intimate theatrical experience—inviting small audiences into the creators’ backyard to gather around a fire, share a beer, and reconnect through storytelling.

Fox noted in a Q&A, the most rewarding part was simply bringing people together again when communal experiences still felt precarious. But staging the show outdoors in New York came with challenges: intense heat, cold, noise from neighbors, and high demand that led to extended performances. Co-creator Henriques added that touring the show to Pottstown and Bloomington allowed them to retain its intimacy while reaching wider audiences, especially those outside the Brooklyn theatre scene. Though originally site-specific, the creators believe The Grown-Ups can adapt well to traditional venues, urging future producers to preserve its atmospheric strangeness and sense of gathering outside the ordinary.

Ogden’s The Grown-Ups

I love unique theatrical experiences, and The Grown-Ups is undeniably that. It’s a show that doesn’t just break the fourth wall; it redefines the architecture of performance entirely. Set around a real campfire, in a real backyard, the production promises immersion, intimacy, and immediacy. And in many ways, it delivers. But for all its atmospheric beauty and conceptual boldness, I found myself longing for more interaction—more acknowledgment that we, the audience, were campers, too.

The immersive experience was different than I expected. The location remains undisclosed until the week of the performance, when audience members receive an email with directions. Upon arrival, you’re greeted by the cast, assigned a “bunk,” and handed a small bag with s’mores ingredients and a wooden roasting stick. Beyond this warm and welcoming introduction, however, the performance didn’t fully deliver on its immersive promise. I anticipated more direct interaction or participatory moments, but instead felt intentionally held at a distance—watching something intimate and unraveling without ever truly stepping inside it. That distance, of course, makes sense when considering the play’s pandemic origins. The Grown-Ups was conceived in a time of enforced separation, when performers and audiences were kept apart for safety. That legacy lingers. The separation here isn’t just physical—it’s emotional and thematic. The play aches with absence, haunted by the quiet disconnection of a world falling apart just beyond reach.

One unexpectedly delightful element was listening to the people next to me lean into the camp setting—chatting like kids on their first night away from home, asking each other what their parents did for work. It was a small but charming reminder that immersive theatre often lives in the audience as much as the performance.

In 2025, when so many are searching for lightness, optimism, or even catharsis, the play’s brooding ambiguity can feel like emotional quicksand. But that’s also its integrity. The Grown-Ups doesn’t offer escape—it offers confrontation. It’s a show that stays with you—not because it overwhelms, but because it leaves behind a question you didn’t want to ask yourself: What would I do if everything fell apart—and no one came to take charge?

Performances

Kokai’s direction is both atmospheric and emotionally precise. She leans into the awkward intimacy created by close proximity, allowing silences to stretch and glances to build quiet pressure. This production demands a great deal of creative vision—after all, theatre is rarely staged outdoors, let alone around a literal campfire. With only four portable lights positioned at each corner of the “stage” to supplement the flickering firelight, Kokai crafts an environment that feels both haunting and intimate, as if we’re among the last people left with a story to tell.

The cast is uniformly strong, with standout performances by Taylor Garlick as Lukas and Lily Hilden as Becca. Garlick delivers a riveting portrayal of a natural and sympathetic leader, buckling under the weight of invisible responsibilities. Equally witty, Garlick is a nuanced performer, eliciting genuine laughter from the audience several times throughout the night without undercutting the gravity of the role. Hilden’s Becca is all nervous energy and flickering conviction—the kind of person who laughs to keep from crying. Hiden’s Becca brings a sharp emotional edge to the role, balancing warmth with an underlying sense of panic.

Chloe Ryan Painter walks a fine line as Maeve, balancing toughness with vulnerability. Her performance bristles with the tension of someone who wants to be in control but feels it slipping away. Mariana Villarreal, as Cassie, grounds the ensemble with calm intensity. Her outsider perspective never feels forced—she delivers each line with clarity and moral weight, embodying the role of a reluctant truth-teller. Sterling Allen is outstanding as Aiden, the assistant camp director whose sense of duty becomes increasingly fragile. His final monologue is a highlight of the production—raw, aching, and delivered with devastating sincerity.

The design team, largely drawn from Weber State’s vibrant theatre program, uses subtlety as a weapon. Cully Long’s scenic and art direction is deceptively simple—benches, sleeping bags, and a few props—but every object carries emotional and narrative weight: coolers, camping chairs, tree stumps, and more. Courtney Christison’s props anchor the production in physical, sensory detail. Lighting design by Caden Shaeffer, paired with Carey Campbell’s sonic manipulation, creates a world where shadows grow teeth. The occasional distant drone or flare of unnatural light suggests a violence beyond the trees.

But perhaps the most unsettling innovation is the integration of Eric Means’ interactive tech elements and Doug Manifold’s drone design which are woven with care and subtlety into the performance. Rather than overwhelming, these elements extend the boundaries of the play’s atmosphere, underscoring the theme of digital surveillance and mediated panic.

Critique

While the production draws power from its intimacy and ambiguity, the apocalypse outside the camp seemed caught between being a symbolic abstraction and a literal crisis. It gestures toward satire and surrealism but also tries to establish real-world stakes—an approach that ultimately dilutes both. The play is strongest when it leans into the abstract, letting the dread remain shapeless and absurd rather than attempting to anchor it in a partially sketched-out civil war. By trying to do both, it loses some of the tension and clarity it might have gained from fully embracing the unknown.

The Grown-Ups touches—briefly but meaningfully—on the troubling legacy of summer camps and their ties to settler colonial practices. There’s a moment of self-awareness when the counselors acknowledge that their camp once bore an Indigenous name, despite its overwhelmingly white history and leadership. The play even goes so far as to note that the land the camp occupies is stolen—an unusually direct admission that speaks to its broader awareness of colonial dynamics. Yet, while the play nods to these realities within its fictional world, the real-world context of the performance space went unacknowledged. Staged in Ogden, Utah—ancestral land of the Northern Shoshone and Goshute peoples—neither the program nor the performers acknowledged the Indigenous communities whose histories are entwined with the land beneath the audience’s feet which felt somewhat ironic. It’s a curious echo of the moment in the play when the counselors change the camp’s name to a more palatable white alternative, as if that alone might cover up past wrongs. In a show so attuned to the legacies we inherit and pass on, even small silences can speak volumes.

What The Grown-Ups ultimately asks is not “what happened?” but “what would you do?” Would you stay at the camp? Would you leave? Would you take power—or would you pretend it isn’t yours? In a culture starved for clear answers, The Grown-Ups offers a dark mirror and a lingering question. The Weber State production, backed by a talented creative team, delivers unsettling intimacy in spades and ensures that question won’t be easily forgotten. And if that’s not enough, the play’s twist ending seals the deal. Don’t miss it!

🎟️ Ticket & Performance Information

Venue: Performed in a secret location on Ogden’s East Bench.

Dates: May 9, 10, 16, and 17, 2025
Showtimes:

• The house opens at 8 (as does s’mores distribution) and the show starts at 8:30 (sunset). 

Tickets: Click here for ticket info

Run Time: Approximately 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Audience Advisory: All patrons require a ticket regardless of age.

Production Company: Sisyphus Happy Theatre
Playwrights: Skylar Fox & Simon Henriques
Director: Jenny Kokai