VPM Drama absolutely knocked it out of the park with their production of The Grown-Ups. It’s a very well-written play, and was further elevated by the amazing performances of the cast. Everyone did a spectacular job bringing their characters to life and making them seem truly human.

The play itself follows a group of camp counselors as they try to keep things together even as the world outside falls apart in the wake of an escalating political and military crisis. Thematically, it’s concerned with the fear of change—born out of either an attachment to the way things are or from a greater fear of the unknown. Much of the conflict in the narrative stems from the necessity of change clashing with the comfort of inertia—be it arguments over camp conventions, strained friendships, or the overarching question of whether or not they should tell the campers about the crisis, all of it comes back to making a choice between retaining the familiar, however fragile, or risking the unknown in hopes of a better future. Is the pain of change worth it? Is it really necessary?

The Grown-Ups answers these questions with some of its own (paraphrased from my infinitely faulty memory)—What matters more? Doing things the way you’ve always done them, or taking the best care of these kids that you can? It urges its audience to reevaluate their priorities and examine convention, but doesn’t fail to acknowledge that there are bad parts of change too. Sometimes change is less of a choice and more of an inevitability—the crisis was always going to reach camp, it was just a matter of when they admitted it. And no one ever wants to admit it. No one wants to say that the world as you know it is ending. No one wants to even think about that, because thinking about it means admitting, to once again lightly paraphrase, that it isn’t camp anymore. It’s something new and scary and no one knows how to deal with it. Sometimes closing your eyes feels easier. Sometimes, you just want to wait and hope it gets better. 

But most times it won’t. Most times, you’ll have to change, and the only choice you’re given is which spot in an increasingly narrow time frame you’ll do it in. And while that’s absolutely abysmal, The Grown-Ups still manages to offer some hope. It reassures that even when things well and truly fall apart, even when it seems like everything is lost, you’ll still be able to find pieces of what mattered most. You’ll survive, and after that, you’ll manage to keep living, too.

In conclusion, if you didn’t see this play, my condolences. You missed something fantastic.