Victoria Lynne Barclay's Camping is about an emotional wilderness rather than a literal one. Across 25 years, two women remain caught in a cycle of love, denial, and recrimination, returning again and again to a childhood tent that somehow proves spacious enough to contain decades of longing, resentment, and unresolved feelings. Presented by Colt Coeur and now extended through July 11 at the HERE Arts Center, Camping is both intimate and surprisingly expansive. I spoke with Barclay about the play's unconventional structure, her journey from Scotland to Off-Broadway, writing deeply human characters, and the challenge of fitting an entire lifetime inside a tent.

You can read the review of Camping here:

Camping at HERE Arts Center

Q:  Congratulations on the extension. How are you feeling with all the feedback about the show?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: Thank you so much. This is my first ever production ever here or in the UK. So this has been wild. I'm really, really overwhelmed by it, to tell you the truth.

Q: Do you remember when you first had the idea to write a play about these two women and use camping as a setting?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: There's so many layers to it. I studied at the University of Glasgow for my undergrad. I did the Theatre Studies program there, and it's a phenomenal program. And I had never really made the connection that playwriting was something that I could do. I just thought it was something that had been done. I was like, they're all already written, why would I? I actually didn't start to write plays until I was 28.

I'd read this myth about a Minoan goddess, Britomartis. She sometimes gets confused with Artemis. There's loads of lore around who the two of them could be, but one of the many lore is that they were lovers. And so I just became obsessed with this idea of these two women free in the woods, hunting their food and being free from men. The play is inspired by that. But, ultimately, the real answer is that it’s an apology to my girlfriends from Scotland. I often feel like I abandoned them.

Q: If you’re comfortable answering this – what would you be apologizing for?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: My immigration story is something I'm still grappling with. I immigrated under Obama, so I had a very different immigration experience than the one we're seeing today that people have to go through. And also, of course, it was afforded huge, huge amounts of privilege because of my whiteness and because of my Scottishness. If you come from the kind of background that I come from and you move to America, you will come home a conquering hero or you will not come home at all. So basically what I'm trying to say is I grapple a lot with feelings of abandonment and with feelings of selfhood, because I was shutting people out and moving to this strange country that none of them get.

Q: There’s a strong through-line in Camping about the idea of leaving your hometown – Brit wrestles with wanting to leave, but feeling like she has to say. Was that idea that was coming from some of your own feelings? 

Victoria Lynne Barclay: Yeah, I mean, my main motivator in trying to write or do anything in my life is class politics. I was one of the only people from my school to go to university. That felt like an abandonment as well, even though Glasgow is only 2 hours away from my hometown. You meet new people. I remember my first day of university, meeting people who told me that I was from a place called Scumdee. I'd never heard that before. I didn't realize that I came from a not very well-off area until I met people who told me otherwise. And I think about a lot of that when I was writing Ari, when I was writing about trying to stay true to your roots, stay true to who you are while meeting these new people who already have an opinion about you because of where you're from.

Q: Everyone uses the word “intimate” when talking about this play – it just feels like heat is radiating off of Colby Minifie and Alice Kremelberg when they touch each other on stage. What was their rehearsal process like for those intimate moments?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: It was beautiful to watch. We worked with an incredible intimacy director, Safwa [Safwa Ozair], and we all arrived in that room day one desperately hoping to fall in love with each other. Our group chat is called the Matriarchal Utopia. We talked a lot about the idea of female intimacy in the world we live in now, in a toxically online, perhaps incel-driven culture, where, especially from my lived experience, female intimacy was always done for the purpose of entertaining or arousing men. It’s very hard to admit that, to be 36 and say, oh, my entire sexual awakening was done for the benefit of someone who's not me. And we talked about that a lot, because how do you stage that, and how do you show that? The intimate moments for me actually are set up in the dialogue. They're set up in the way they talk to each other.

Q: The way male sexuality is discussed in the play is so, so dark. Ari, talking about her sex life with her husband, says, “I'll come home, he'll meet me in the bedroom, lights off, ESPN on. Two to three minutes later I'll be wiping cum off my ass cheeks.” What did you want to say about male sexuality and the loveless way in which it gets expressed?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: That's such a good question. In terms of like the heterosexual experience, I think it was interesting to approach a play from the idea of what women might want. And I think in order to do that, I had to approach it through what they're getting. There’s also a conversation in that same scene about how Ari gets mutilated after she gives birth; against her consent, she gets an involuntary stitch down there. I did a lot of research in working on this play, and all of that is pulled from real life – Guardian articles, web forums, people writing on Reddit. I think about women that are in relationships with men for a very long period of time, and how sex is talked about for those kinds of women. I think about porn a lot.

I'm writing a play right now about Gertrude from Hamlet, and unfortunately my head is still very much in that headspace. I just feel like Gertrude's, like -- look, a man died. She met another man and she was finally enjoying sex. And that's why your wee boy is pissed off at you. Something's not right. Something's wrong. So yeah, I've become a bit obsessed with that.

Q: Is there other work, contemporary or otherwise, that has influenced you, or is a touchstone for you when you're doing your work?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: After I had written the Scottish version of Camping, I came to school and I was exposed to a play by Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini. They're a London-based playwright and they've written this play called Sleepova, like multi-award-winning – I think it won an Olivier. And I read Sleepova after I had written Camping and the women in Matilda's play stay around about the same age, there's not the same time jumps, but similar kind of themes around queerness, around religion. So, that's a huge one. And just honestly, a shout out to an absolute cracker of a play. If an American has never read it, you really, really should.

When I started to write, I couldn't afford to learn to write. If that makes sense. I was really hard up. My husband and a bunch of his friends, they got together and bought me a playwriting class because it was $400, which is just money we just still to this day do not have.

And he did that because I was depressed. I was very, very, very homesick, and through that I was exposed to the arts and crafts of writing through Abe Koogler, who is an incredible teacher. When I wasn’t doing that ridiculously expensive class, I was watching videos on YouTube about playwriting. There’s a video of the writer Paula Vogel at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, which I have given all 500 views on YouTube. 

Q: What did Paula say?

Victoria Lynne Barclay: So the one clip that I watch on repeat is this 2-minute clip where she's talking about the plasticity of playwriting, and she talks about it as a feminized practice, which is this idea that we don't necessarily have to be Aristotelian with our rigidity around structures, around plot, around telling stories. She says that there’s a more feminized feminine way of accessing our histories, of repeating the stories. That’s what I’m aiming for in my own writing. My colleague Gloria says that gossip is what makes the world work. Like, that’s the healthy female equivalent of a functioning society. 

Q: When did you start feeling like you could make a career out of this? 

Victoria Lynne Barclay: I can honestly sit here and say this to you: I have just had my first premiere in New York, off-off Broadway, and it’s still very difficult for me to sit here and tell you I’m a playwright. I think it’s going to take me a while. I’m okay with that.

I think a lot about my Uncle Billy. My Uncle Billy fits CCTVs in Dundee in rich people's houses. And I think about: how I would tell Uncle Billy that my full-time job is playwright? What would he say to me?

I finished Abe Koogler’s class in 2018. I had written a revenge play about my boss.  At that time, I was an executive assistant, and I thought my life would be as an executive assistant, and I’d write plays in my spare time and maybe people would read them, and that could be nice. The company that I did Abe’s class with gives you half off another class if you TA for them, which is what I did, and that’s how I met Matthew Paul, who submitted me to an award called the Venturous Playwright foundation. It was a grant, and that’s how Colt Coeur found my script, because they publish the 14 nominated playwrights on their website.  There's a company in Scotland called Playwright Studio Scotland, and I applied to their school with my play and got it; I’ve done a year of it now and I’ve got two more years left.

But all of that took place from the end of 2024 until now. So it’s really only been a year and a half. I feel like I’m watching someone else, and I hoep I get to catch up with that woman and ask her, are you having a nice time? Are you having fun? 

Q: You definitely seem like a playwright to me, just to give you some external, male validation, which we all know means everything. Also, the New York Times thinks so. 

Victoria Lynne Barclay: Oh my God, I saw that.

Q: Yeah, send that to Uncle Billy.

Victoria Lynne Barclay: Well, the first thing he would say is, what is the New York Times?

Q: I also wanted to ask – what reactions have you gotten from audiences? What did you hope people would take away from Camping, and have they? 

Victoria Lynne Barclay: I saw John Proctor Is The Villain last year, and at the end of it I was full body sobbing because I love a cry, as you can probably tell.

And I stood up, and a woman in front of me, she was a couple years older than me, was standing holding her husband's hand and I was holding mine. And she looked at me and she looked at her husband and she said, "Oh, I guess they'll just never get it, will they?" Wow. My biggest dream was that somebody could come to this play and just know that they're not alone, and that I've thought these things too, and that there are other people in the world who have thought these things too, who have had their heart broken by things that cannot be and things that they really, really, really want. And Talia, who is the dramaturg, she told me after the first performance that she had reconnected with an old friend. And that’s all I wanted. We could have stopped the show there. The play did its job.