Often the best plays are the ones that know how to masterfully balance tone. They have humor and heart and poignancy, and can make you laugh gregariously one minute and starting to tear up the next. They present things so fully and honestly that you leave with your heart full and feeling emotionally released.

Loey Jones-Perpich’s new play, 13 Nights in the Woods Somewhere North of Lake Michigan, had a staged reading as part of the Boston New Playwrights Expo at the Calderwood Pavilion last September. The show managed to capture a whole spectrum of emotions beautifully, from mindless fun to grief to nostalgia to anger to new young love to the confusion that comes with growing up and facing new experiences, by sharing stories about a group of people still figuring out how to put words to those emotions in the first place – a pack of barely adolescent girls.

13 Nights in the Woods follows six girls in their last year at summer camp, in June of 1997, before they age out of the program. Allison, Erin, Jamie, and Casey have all been attending for years, while Beth is the newcomer of the group (though she has been to church camp before). Through the two weeks at camp, they discuss crushes and kissing, joke around, sneak in candy through tampons included in a care package, inform some of the members of the group the other uses of tampons besides hiding candy contraband, and are highly aware this is the last summer they get to have these moments. But they also grapple with new challenges – Overshadowing the whole session is the fact that their friend and former camp mate, Louise, died the previous winter. Not all of the girls are quite sure how to talk about it, or her. Their grief and all the things they didn’t have words for bubbles up alongside the more mundane challenges of growing up like discovering new crushes and if Judy Bloom’s exercise to insure you’ll grow a large bust is actually true or totally made up.

Both the script and the cast captured something incredibly authentic about being a girl on the cusp of adolescence in the magically heightened liminal place that is summer camp. Notable among the cast was a stellar performance by Isan Salem.

The energy is like a non-stop slumber party, there’s joking and singing and confessions. While you know camp must end, you feel sure these friends you made you’ll keep in your life forever. There’s a charm to the innocence and awkwardness of youth as it clashes with the first steps into adulthood, and having a firm end date to this time of life only brings more awareness. It being the last year of camp for these girls also adds urgency – Words said and actions taken now may not have a chance to be undone in the future.

Even now in the stage reading phase of development, 13 Nights Somewhere in the Woods is full of life and energy. The characters and relationships feel like they’re getting so well defined with nicely developed arcs. The humor and heart shine in equal measures. With any luck, this play will have a good life ahead of it, because with the next bit of polishing and full staging, it seems poised for success.