Two bunk beds with identical wooden frames appear at left and right.
One holds a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl at a Canadian sleepaway camp, spreading her wings in that giddy, liminal space where parents and counsellors recede, and selfhood begins to crystallize. The other holds a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl imprisoned by the Nazis during World War 2, who is fighting for her sanity and her life.
Somehow, the same word — “camp” — contains both.
Naomi Tessler’s Camp, now at Sweet Action Theatre, is a devastatingly simple and potent conceit that is executed with precision and emotional courage. Tessler wrote it, composed the music, and performs the role of Greta, the Holocaust-era girl in the bunk on the right, while Lauren Mayer embodies Lila, the contemporary girl on the left. Director Alice Fox Lundy anchors the production in their separately exquisite performances, before introducing movement and harmony that bleed between them, facilitating commentary and conversation that crosses the intervening decades.
In monologues, the girls take turns bringing their situations to life through anecdotes and emotions with notable common threads: loving families, Jewish faith and ritual, clothing, menstruation, relationships with campmates, love, and sexual violence. The inflections, of course, are entirely different. Lila’s stories seem simple, trivial, and sometimes laughable: in the thrill of her final year at this camp, she revels in a cabin filled with trusted friends, a boy she’s interested in, and the chance to try on adult freedoms without pesky parental supervision. Meanwhile, Greta’s stories are harrowing, horrific, and existential, rooted in the wrenching separation from family, brutal acts of violation, and a systematic attempt to strip her of her humanity.
But the seeds, we come to see, are actually the same: uncertainty, ignorance, fear, and gender violence. And the antidotes, found at a sleepaway camp after unexpected trauma, and clung to tenaciously in the concentration camp, are also the same: the solidarity of family, faith, sisterhood, and society, and a deep, common humanity that binds us.
Mayer’s Lila is achingly naive and radiant, thrilled to participate in camp rituals and (so she thinks) to take risks and test her emerging sexuality. Tessler’s Greta gives us an absolutely gutting grounding in the dehumanizing evil of the Holocaust: her voice quavering, she shakes, rocks, and quivers with horror, her eyes by turns haunted and shining with resilience. She becomes luminescent as she reaches inside to insist on decency, help others in the tiny ways she can, and conduct her “quiet choir” of concentration camp women who sing to resist.
Speaking of singing … the music is magical. Violinist Veronica Zupanic accompanies Greta with classical texture, while guitarist Jessica Stuart backs Lila with upbeat, folk-rocky energy. Without this music, the show might be unbearable, but Tessler’s songs do more than provide relief. They pull the audience right into the fabric of the show, making us part of what unifies these disparate stories of pain across the decades. We don’t just bear witness to these stories with our eyes and ears: we participate in them with our voices.
A pivot to explicit messaging near the end shifts the play’s register … and jarred me. “Never again for anyone” becomes a repeated statement and the name of a song sung at this point. Simple, powerful, and unassailable as this sentiment is, it startles in these fraught and polarized times because it feels uncomfortably subject to second-guessing, to questions of “what about…” and “does that include…”. I take on faith that it applies to wounds suffered and trauma transmitted by all humanity — and expresses the sincere desire that every 15-year-old girl experience no version of the bunk on the right, and enjoy some version of the bunk on the left (but ideally better).
This declarative briefly disrupts the spell of this deeply personal tale of Lila and Greta, but it doesn’t break it. Beyond this stage, beyond this city, and beyond our times, there are countless other bunks with countless other girls discovering who they might become … or fighting simply to remain human.
Tessler’s ninety minutes insist that we hold both in view — and ask what we will do about the distance between them.
Branch Out Theatre’s Camp plays at Sweet Action Theatre (180 Shaw Street, Artscape Youngplace, Unit 106) through November 14, 2026. Audience Advisory: Camp explores sensitive subject matter pertaining to lived experiences of a girl in a concentration camp during the Holocaust including references to sexual violence. It is suitable strictly for audiences 14 years of age and up. Tickets and information are available at universe.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
