Tradition and change collide around the campfire in ‘The Grown-Ups’

Absurd Rodeo Theatre’s backyard staging of The Grown-Ups makes this unsettling comedy feel immediate and essential.

On my way to the bathroom after Absurd Rodeo Theatre’s The Grown-Ups, I found myself in line with a woman who looked shell-shocked. With my lawn chair slung over one shoulder, I asked what she thought. She stared ahead for nearly 10 seconds before answering.

“It just felt so eerily modern,” she said.

An uncomfortable conversation to have while waiting for a toilet, perhaps. But it was also a fitting postscript to Simon Henriques and Skylar Fox’s play, which begins as a nostalgic hangout among summer-camp counselors and slowly reveals a darker question: When the traditions that shaped you hurt others, how much are you willing to change?

That makes The Grown-Ups a smart selection for Absurd Rodeo Theatre, a young company whose first devised work, How to Starve an Artist, asked whether Gen Z artists could build sustainable lives inside inherited theatrical systems. Its first scripted production widens the frame. Here, the institution under examination is Indigo Woods, a beloved camp that has recently changed its problematic name, retired an overly intense competition and found itself increasingly entangled with bureaucracy and the world beyond its gates.

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Meanwhile, an online argument over whether a pineapple resembles Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson metastasizes into a violent culture war debate that the camp finds itself increasingly involved in. Absurd Rodeo lets that escalation creep up on the audience by first making Indigo Woods feel disarmingly comfortable, using the backyard to draw spectators into the camp’s insular world.

The cast of Absurd Rodeo Theatre’s production of The Grown-Ups. | Photo: Dave Hintz

Communal outdoor setting

Director and scenic designer Levi Franklin begins creating the environment from the moment spectators enter the Northglenn backyard where several company members live. Audience members bring lawn chairs, blankets or whatever else they want to sit on. A “Welcome, campers” sign greets them. String lights hang between trees. A real fire burns at the center, while actual crickets mingle with Sam Webb’s spare sound design.

The five actors enter from the house, descend a wooden staircase, circle behind spectators and settle around the fire, pulling the audience into the counselors’ after-hours debrief. Time passes without laborious scene changes; shifting conversations, bits of face paint and small costume alterations do the work.

Tori Walton’s costumes deepen the effect. Everyone wears the same purple Indigo Woods counselor shirt, but each has personalized it. Maeve’s is a fashionable off-the-shoulder top with beads on the bottom, whereas Lucas’ sleeveless version reads athletic. The uniforms suggest a shared institution while the alterations quietly insist that nobody inhabits it in quite the same way.

Colleen Swift and Cal Meakins in The Grown-Ups. | Photo: Dave Hintz

Compromise gets complicated

That easygoing atmosphere also gives the actors room to make the ideological disagreements feel like ruptures between actual friends instead of positions in an argument. Colleen Swift gives Maeve the relentless brightness of someone for whom camp has largely worked exactly as promised. Her cheer can be funny, but Swift also lets you see the effort required to maintain her upbeat temperament when changes threaten the version of Indigo Woods she loves.

Cal Meakins makes Lucas an appealing counterweight: charming, aware of his privilege and genuinely receptive to change. What is more revealing is how Meakins lets that confidence drain away when Lucas is asked to do more than listen sympathetically. When Lucas is finally asked to do more than listen sympathetically, Meakins lets him squirm before he finds the nerve to contribute.

Alexis Vigil, as camp newcomer Cassie, presses hardest against inherited customs precisely because they are not second nature to her. Vigil’s strongest moment comes when Cassie finally tells her own story around the fire. Her controlled delivery turns what initially sounds like another campfire confession into one of the evening’s spookiest passages.

Chrys Duran and Paul Davis complete an ensemble Franklin keeps loose and conversational, which is essential. The mounting danger only registers because these five first convince us they are young adults killing time, teasing one another and trying to decompress after another long day with campers.

That intimacy is embedded in the play’s history. Henriques and Fox first staged The Grown-Ups in their Brooklyn backyard in 2021, surrounding a small audience with performers around a real campfire. Absurd Rodeo’s production nods directly to that origin.

The fire crackles, crickets chirp, actors pass within feet of the audience and the night itself seems to close around Indigo Woods as its problems become harder to contain. Even after the performance ends, spectators are encouraged to linger, talk and make s’mores, extending the show’s atmosphere beyond the final scene.

Absurd Rodeo Theatre is emerging as a company with a knack for matching adventurous material with inventive staging. With The Grown-Ups, this young company gives Colorado audiences another reason to keep an eye on what it does next.