Alice Kremelberg and Colby Minifie Photo by Maria Baranova

At the outset of Victoria Lynne Barclay's touching two-person study of the intimacies of friendship, Camping, now getting a very well-acted premiere production at HERE Arts Center, 15-year-old best friends Brit and Ari, convinced they're the only virgins left in their school grade, await two boys they've invited to join them in a tent to have sex.

Played by grown-up actors Alice Kremelberg and Colby Minifie, the small-town Ohio girls who will age their characters to 40 by the play's end, are not all that intrigued with the sexual experience. They just want to get it over with so they can avoid the social stigma of not having done it.

"Last fucking virgins in the school dude. It's embarrassing. Having to ask to get your cherry popped? It's embarrassing."

But the inseparable pair are also aware of rumors about their relationship, and Barclay's understated, suggestive writing prepares us for 90 minutes of observing the lives of two young girls who, in varying degrees, go on to live unsatisfactory lives in accordance with repressive norms.

Set designer Krit Robinson covers the entire upstage, top to bottom, in solid black, save for leaving the audience a view of nothing but the inside of their standard green tent, just large enough for two. Lighting designer Vittoria Orlando offers shadowy views that subtly change textures with the weather and time of day. In a sense, the visual is that of a symbolic womb, a safe space cut off from the rest of the world where Brit and Ari can nurture each other as they emotionally develop.

While the tent setting always remains, we touch base with them as 18-year old Girl Scout leaders, 22-year-olds hanging out at a music festival, and as 30-, 35- and 40-year-olds maneuvering through marriage and motherhood. All throughout there are the unspoken feelings, first expressed as teenage goofing around that ends abruptly with a mention of the word "dyke," and eventually as hesitant, tension-filled moments of possibilities.

Sex is a subject that continually pops up, and it's never pretty. From their initial post-coital feelings of having been "stabbed repeatedly in the vag" to Brit's acceptance of a ride home from an older man who obviously intends to have sex with her ("If it's between a ride home or having to walk for three miles I'm always taking the creep taxi") to Ari's spouse approving of her doctor's suggestion that he give her a post-delivery "husband stitch" while she was barely conscious.

Guided by Adrienne Campbell-Holt's sensitive direction, Kremelberg's Brit is the dominant leader of the pair when they're rambunctious kids, with Minifie's Ari cautiously adhering to her friend's adolescent worldliness. But when Ari decides to go off to Ohio University while Brit stays in town bartending, it signals the beginning of their growth in different directions. Much of this is signaled by designer Sarita P. Fellows' costumes and the way the characters change into them in stylized transitions between scenes.

Camping is Victoria Lynne Barclay's first play and it's quite an impressive debut. Having little in common with the characters or any of their experiences, I was often struck with surprise at the situations described with the matter-of-fact frankness of people who, way too soon in life, decide the best way to go is to try and fit in. I imagine Brit and Ari's story will strike more personal chords with many other playgoers.