Lights out on Kumbayah: Defiance Comedy sums up summer camp, eh?

Though it's not required, summer camps often boost their uniqueness with scary tales featuring local boogeymen, always effective around the campfire. In IndyFringe Festival's "Camp Summer Camp," a mystery holds the plot together like a crafts project executed by an all-thumbs camper. 

But that's all to the good for the sort of ensemble "laff riot" Defiance Comedy specializes in. The show is a successor to 2023's "Being Rob Johansen," a parody that also thrust forward the Defianceista named in the title. Even so, the energy was distributed well, with a small host of off-the-wall characterizations shaped to a focused result. Thus it continues in "Camp Summer Camp." 

If you have summer camp experience, it may resemble this show only obliquely, but that will be enough to resonate amid the generalized madness. Adolescent as well as preteen self-consciousness will generate anxiety and curiosity, as it did in my memory of camp. One of them was all-male, so of course there was more than a dash of bravado and dismissiveness during my annual two-week sojourn among boys I didn't know from back home. And at Camp Chickagami near the Lake Huron shore, we also had a legendary bugbear, whose name may have been The Webelo, though that also seems too close to the upper class of Cub Scouts. Whatever, but the creature lurked somehow and somewhere close at night.

"Camp Summer Camp" puts a couple of females among the guys, who include an American matinee-idol type, a champion falconer who can't seem to summon his bird on cue. The setting in Canada in 1984 keeps the action out of the iPhone-focused present day, so that talking about certain people becomes as fraught as talking to certain people. And crossing the threshold from puppy love to being a playa moves up on boys' personal agendas. Girls negotiate the rite of passage differently. Let's just leave that there.

The problem is summed up in a lusty number called "Sex Talk." It is a high point of the vigorously choreographed songs, and the spoken dialogue is similarly rich in coordinated gestures and physical  enhancement of the words. 

Defiance Comedy has made a number of choices to provide a few threads of credibility in the midst of the madness. Camp Summer Camp as an organized community has rules and customs that are under the loose control of beleaguered directors, played in this show by Indianapolis' First Couple of Theater: Rob Johansen and Jen Johansen.  

If you can say "about" as a Canadian would, you will recognize it's not quite "aboot" or "aboat," but somewhere in between. It's thus not surprising that among the cast, some of the dialogue was flecked with Irish or Scottish touches. 

On Friday night before a raucous, adoring crowd, there were a few places where the recorded song accompaniments didn't fall into place precisely at the start. But there was so much that coalesced unerringly that everything came out both tidy and uproarious on the whole.  

As in actual camp life, the required letters home never come close to telling the whole story. You have to be there. Welcome to Camp Summer Camp.