Vigilance Theater Returns with ‘Campfire Stories’

Vigilance Theater, the immersive theater group that recently brought Mac Beth to local theatergoers, is already back in time for the thinning veil of autumn—the perfect time for telling Campfire Stories. This time, Vigilance takes us to Camp Guyasuta, a Scouting America camp in Sharpsburg, PA, where the counselors at Camp Moonside are preparing for their annual Scary Story Competition. As with other Vigilance productions, this is no black box theater performance around a flickering LED campfire. Campfire Stories (directed by Brooke Echnat) takes place around a warm fire at an outdoor amphitheater, nestled into the woods about a 5-minute walk beyond the parking lot at Guyasuta. With free s’mores and an array of other snacks available to purchase near the fireside, guests at Camp Moonside are certainly well taken care of. Regrettably, though, our time as campers did not include any trips down the zipline our guides so tantalizingly walked us past—maybe next time. 

At Campfire Stories, the immersion that Vigilance is known for begins before you even reach the stage (a theatrical doctrine that I’m sure Adrian Țofei would approve of). By the time we had made our final turn up the hill to the amphitheater, we could already hear the camp counselors belting out their favorite campfire songs on the acoustic guitar and as we came into the clearing, were greeted with enthusiastic cries of “more campers!” Undoubtedly, your own personal history with summer camps will color this introduction to Camp Moonside; whether you were an eager participant in the unreality of the camp experience or a nervous wallflower reluctantly being whisked from makeshift station to makeshift station during camp orientation, the first twenty minutes or so of Campfire Stories may prove to be the scariest part. 

As you settle in and the counselors make their introductions and interact with the audience, it won’t be long before you begin to notice that something at Camp Moonside is—not quite right. There’s a certain disconnect between the bubbly attitudes of the counselors and the wary alertness of the groundskeeper, Al. But that’s camp! Right? In any case, before you know it, senior camp counselor Elizabeth will wrangle the other staffers to begin the highlight of the evening—the infamous Camp Moonside Scary Story Competition. The rules are simple: each of the five counselors will get a chance to tell their scary story, and at the end of the night, the audience gets to decide which story was the scariest. And nothing will go awry.

My favorite part of Campfire Stories is getting to see the different approaches and personalities each counselor brings to their respective stories. Some recite their stories with a practiced fireside manner while another might lean more heavily into the gruesome details of a particularly bloody story. Where one counselor might take a more interactive approach, using the full breadth of the amphitheater to their advantage, another may take a more traditional “center stage” stance. The performers are as varied as the stories themselves, and though avid readers of ghost stories may recognize some of the tales, it's the performances that make them come to life. 

In particular, though, I appreciated how the story portion of the evening concluded—with a reminder that in so many ghost stories that are told and retold until they become legends, there is often, at their hearts, a kernel of truth: of real people who went through real experiences. And while ghost stories can, of course, be a lot of fun, they deserve that we approach them with compassion and understanding. Stories are meant to be learned from. Whether there is a moral to take, a lesson to learn, or even if just to keep a legacy alive, Campfire Stories keeps one of humanity’s oldest pastimes alive.

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Article by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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