Find an event
11:11
This sweet and featherweight play takes a textured approach to the familiar sitcom trope of a bunch of squares accidentally ingesting a mind-altering drug. The unwitting rollers of 11:11 (the name refers to a Bible verse) are a pack of Christian counselors on the eve of another “best summer ever” at Camp Methuselah, where they swallow Ecstasy tabs smuggled in by the camp’s new lifeguard in an Aleve bottle. Yes, making out under the influence ensues, as do dramatic revelations and wacky strobe-lit dances. But the cast, playing it in eight different shades of earnest, beautifully portrays the questing, hormonal curiosity of young adulthood, leavened with buoyant comic timing.
Nick Sieben’s set is lovingly designed—stained wood, Crayola-ed posters, an ubiquitous church guitar—and playwrights Linder and Sissom capture perfectly the insular, jargony world of camp culture, both richly specific and universal enough to embrace anyone who’s ever gone to summer camp or encountered it in popular culture. Sissom is excellent as a mercilessly loving, by-the-book believer, as is Whit Nelson, as a Harvard Divinity School misfit whose drugged state induces him to start work on a new holy book, tentatively titled the “Bebble.”
The seeds of the play’s elegiac ending are strewn in the kids’ constant examining of their faith, opening the door to questions that lie deeper than the God-loving slogans printed on their neon wristbands. Ultimately, however, 11:11 stays within its bounds of comedy with a heart that outpaces the will to skewer.
