Philly Fringe 2025: Paper Doll Ensemble presents Pinky Promise

This world premiere, the first full production from local troupe Paper Doll Ensemble, captures this weird and precious period of girlhood. In a series of scenes set at Frog Bunk at Camp Hubert Beauford, we follow Miriam, Heidi, and Phoebe in their last summer as campers.

Miriam (Simi Toledano) is looking to her burgeoning romantic horizons, hoping to boost her confidence from troubles back home. Heidi (Grayce Carson) is the quintessential horse girl, a tad immature but perfectly 12 as she brings a collection of hobby horses for them to ride. And drumming devotee Phoebe (Sara Quagliata) is the trio’s glue, balancing her friends’ maturity spectrum while holding big emotions of her own.

Camp is a sacred tradition for their annual friendship, filled with important traditions and sharing of secrets. But as it always does, puberty and all that comes with it—periods, crushes, and bodies—make this summer complicated. But how can hormones be your biggest problem when the camp talent show is on the horizon, and no one can agree on what to perform?

Talent is definitely on display here from both creators and actors. Devised in Paper Doll Ensemble’s signature collaborative devising process, Pinky Promise’s script is littered with cultural references to ground us in 2005. (I had only one quibble: while flipping through magazines, they mention a cute Selena Gomez, who wouldn’t have her Disney breakthrough until the following year.)

Like Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves or Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, this play is rife with truthful and tender adolescent perspectives on the world. But those heavier themes never bog down the show’s comedic aspect. Under director Carly L. Bodnar, the performers have their dynamics perfectly in sync, and the physical comedy comes from both their embodiment of tween awkwardness and the absurdity of their situations.

Marcia Ferguson’s original music breathes new life into the concept of camp songs (more than one audience member was humming the “Hootie Bootie” theme). And of course, not one of these professionals breaks character, even as the audience cracks up. But we’re not laughing at the girls/women. We’re laughing because we’ve been there, we know that feeling, and here we get to reexperience it to an absurd degree onstage.

Pinky Promise is melodramatic and campy, but also heartbreakingly real. Its ending is surprisingly authentic, before pulling together in an anachronistic (but fitting) dance party remix. I don’t want to place too much meaning on a dance number, but it’s poignant for the final moment to be the girls—or the women, should you read it that way—taking up space in their joy. After all, that’s the Paper Doll Ensemble mission: putting women onstage in all their complexity. Sometimes, that complexity is found in the fragile friendships of 12-year-old girls at summer camp. Pinky-promise me that you’ll see this Fringe show.