2008. Before the recession truly begins and Obama was elected for the first time. Five recent college grads are charged with keeping a slew of hormonal teenagers alive at an all-girls summer camp. Saddled with crippling student loans and terror over what they’ll do next in life, the counselors forego their actual work to have one last hurrah before adulthood kicks in. But the camp has many mysteries around its history and there are more monsters here than their looming debts. What starts as a substance-fueled party, soon becomes a battle for the soul. The Lost Girls is a horror-comedy about privilege and purpose, feminism and fear that’s part ghost story and part history play about elections and that specific time of life between college and the real world before we realized how bad things could get.

***A previous version of this script was produced and performed at Annex Theater (Seattle, WA) in 2016 directed by the talented Kaytlin McIntyre. The previous production was nominated for a Gregory Award for Best New Play. This production was fantastic, but overlapped with the 2016 election, which meant some of the moments didn’t feel right anymore, in particular the previous draft’s neat ending. Motivated by the challenges of this time and wanting to wrestle with further complexities these characters might face, I re-wrote the piece.

This draft has undergone significant revision since the 2016 production. It includes an entirely new character (Shannon), several new scenes, and a drastically different tone and plot.