By Katey Hoffman. Directed by Rachel Peake. A Solo Collective Theatre production. At Performance Works on Saturday, November 19. Continues until November 27

I never went to summer camp, but I know that, archetypally, it comes somewhere between innocence and experience, the end of childhood and the beginning of adult disillusionment and responsibility. That’s the liminal life territory attentively, lovingly mapped in Green Lake.

Playwright Katey Hoffman’s central character is Jane, a 25-year-old aspiring writer whose assignment, “Who Am I?” gets her thinking about a pivotal summer in her past. At 13, she’s packed off to camp by her flighty mom and is immediately captivated by Skittles, one of the camp counsellors. Skittles is two years older and vastly more worldly (she’s read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar more than once); she sees a kindred spirit in Jane and takes her under her wing. (“She’s an X-ray machine!” Jane marvels, feeling seen in a whole new way.) Years later, a chance reunion with Skittles inspires Jane to seek out the father who left when she was five.

This is Hoffman's first outing a solo playwright (she cowrote the 2016 Fringe Festival hit The After After Party), and her presentational text parcels out the narration among Jane and several other characters in spare, poetic refrains. There are flashes of provocative humour (“If you listen closely at night, you can hear the sound of hymens popping”) as well as memorable images: “I want my back tickled until my teeth fall out,” Jane says, longing for childhood pleasures after witnessing an R-rated betrayal. The script privileges language: teenage writer Jane reverently recites lists of her favourite words.

But early on Jane tells us, “I’m the kind of writer who hides behind her words,” and Hoffman’s stylistic choices are sometimes self-conscious. Jane’s last name is No Name, and her family has moved from Small Town to Nowhere. I get the intention: nonspecific equals universal, but being able to see Jane as something other than an abstraction might encourage us to empathize more deeply with her longing to understand herself and her place in the world.

Yvan Morissette’s handsome, minimalist set is extremely versatile: a scalloped series of wooden trestles suggests everything from bunk beds to an ultra-hip coffee counter and beachside cliffs, and director Rachel Peake moves her four excellent actors around the otherwise bare space with choreographic precision. Alexandra Lainfiesta is a dewy-eyed and openhearted Jane, skinless in her innocence, in contrast to Kayla Deorksen’s always confident, always guarded Skittles. Michael Scholar Jr. and Donna Soares are both strong in multiple supporting roles, including a sleazy camp counsellor and a perplexed and weary father (Scholar), and a mean-girl cabinmate and outrageously narcissistic mother (Soares).

We’ve all lived through that awkward age; Hoffman is brave to revisit it in this auspicious solo writing debut.