The Sincerity of Camp
Lesbian Wilderness Retreat From Hell
When my friend and I arrive at Cabaret Lion D’or, we’re a little late. Lucky for us, the show hasn’t started yet. It is, however packed: I sit at one of the scant few remaining empty tables, and am immediately intervened on by director Mariah Inger.
“You’re going to want another seat,” she tells me. “Your view will be interrupted, here.”
Not feeling social enough to literally share a table with anyone else, my friend and I relocate to a slightly better seat on the other side of the venue. It’s in the process of relocating that my friend (late twenties) tells me that she has not actually seen a play since she was about thirteen. Her re-introduction to live theatre after a fifteen year hiatus will be the Sapphic horror comedy Lesbian Wilderness Retreat from Hell, as produced by Misfit Films.
Misfit is the same company that created the very successful Lesbian Speed Date From Hell! In a similar vein, Wilderness Retreat explores themes related to relationships and intimacy as they are facilitated through the internet. Speed Date was largely about the concept of ghosting, in a dating context, and how going about our most intimate interactions online can make us behave like monsters. Wilderness Retreat has a somewhat broader scope, instead focusing on the cost of exposure, and the failure of a large online audience to stand in as a replacement for community and connection.
One “up-and-coming Influencer” (unemployed Montrealer), Jazz, wins a golden ticket to a special retreat for queer industry big-wigs. When she arrives, she discovers that there is no retreat, and the whole affair is in fact a murderous scheme orchestrated by a shadowy billionaire. Perhaps worse, the influencers she admired are also not who she thought they were: her parasocial besties are a bunch of mean, phony narcissists — and it seems like they’re all actively trying to hide the unforgivable things they’ve done.
I loved this show. I think that all horror is doublespeak: there’s “what’s scary” about the story (a monster, a curse, a murderer) and then there’s the primal human fear the story is actually talking about: our fundamental vulnerability, our guilt, the way some bad things will always happen no matter how hard we try to stop them. This show reminds us that being marginalized along lines of gender and sexuality doesn’t excuse us, collectively, from being cruel and petty and imperfect. You don’t have to spend more than a few minutes in a so-called “queer safe space” to find people willing to cannibalize one another for the sake of status or ego like any standard-issue meathead bully.
I don’t think there’s anything groundbreaking, necessarily, in the analysis of cancel culture presented in Lesbian Wilderness Retreat from Hell, but I do think it’s a dialogue that needs to continue to happen. The show also has clever ways of implicating the audience in the excesses of the human-devastation-as-mass-entertainment spectacle of the online cancellation: which is that we actually play a character in the show. The bloodbath is being live-streamed to the followers of the influencer characters back home, and we get to watch the carnage play out in real time — and decide, by way of a poll linked through a QR code on a business card, if the characters should be cancelled or forgiven. I can let you imagine how that played out.
The performances are all superb — Alyssa Angelucci-Wall is an excellent audience surrogate, playing the nonstop barrage of plot twists with a surprise and horror that seems consistently sincere and interesting. The influencer ensemble manages to play a collection of characters so larger-than-life that they’re cacophonous as a collective, and it is almost a relief as they die off. Everyone is a kind of queer archetype without necessarily being a queer stereotype — Elly Pond, specifically, plays squeaky fashionista Mel Bee in a way that’s bratty and annoying while also being sincerely loving and vulnerable.
The play is a funny one, but I very much appreciated that the horror sequences were genuinely scary. The horror is campy, but all true camp is sincere. The sincerity contributes to a melodrama that lingered and disturbed me. Shout out especially to actor Hannah Morrow, whose performance as the Creature has an unnerving physicality that builds until the intensity is allowed to break, at the end, in one of the most satisfying twists I’ve seen in theatre in a while.
Lesbian Wilderness Retreat from Hell will make you laugh, scream, and mistrust your phone!
Running until 9 August, 2025. Get your tickets now!
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