Girlfails
Theater Exile
340 S 13th St.
Philadelphia
Showing July 10 - 19, 2025
Lemonade Stand, a new theater company founded by young Philly-based writers and actors, is staging their latest original play, Girlfails, at Theater Exile in South Philly. Girlfails follows two roommates-slash-best friends, Joy and Frankie, as they navigate the ups and downs of their 20s. The production presents a youthful energy that audiences might expect to see on a "friends"-style sitcom. Successfully adapting such a standard storyline for the stage only underscores the intimate novelty of young adulthood at play.
The entire show is set in the roommates' apartment. The staging is similar to the setup for a multi-cam show on network television. Settling into my own seat, the first thing that caught my attention was the detail put into making this apartment look lived-in: The pop-up walls are lacquered with posters and clothes are strewn around the floor. Before the actors even utter their first lines, we have a distinct sense of their characters’ personalities, which the stage design weaves together intricately to show the protagonists' inseparability. There's a tropey moment where, after a fight, Frankie lays down a long piece of tape to divide their space — which only goes to illustrate how these two girls are, like it or not, stuck with one another.
Though a mere audience member, I felt like I was in the apartment with this pair. Joy and Frankie are the only two characters that appear for the show's full runtime, unless you count a remote-controlled pet lab rat on wheels. We watch their relationship as it would naturally exist: primarily in the intimate space of their home. Girlfails, as a live theater show, recreates the sense of risky spontaneity that comes with early evolution into adulthood. It relies on familiar conventions of both stage and television while still giving us intentional storytelling that captures the banality of life without feeling boring or generic.
Following an episodic structure, the scenes unravel much like a Gen-Z version of Seinfeld, the '90s blueprint for self-deprecating friendship comedies. This is a “show about nothing." But what the play does even better than more expansive sitcoms with countless secondary characters is this: It implicitly argues that we can never have enough of the same old story so long as it comes with new protagonists that are well-written and complex. Liv Shoup’s modern script — which deals with social anxiety, toxic relationships, career uncertainty, post-college gloom and unconditional love — only adds more nuance and color to the countless other fictional portrayals of brazenly imperfect women that have shaped a new generation of comediennes.
While theater as a medium helps Joy and Frankie's story sing, I would also be down to hang out and bond with these characters over multiple seasons of a sitcom if I had the chance to. I may get my wish someday — according to Girlfails’ Instagram page, the TV pilot adaptation of the show has been named a finalist for the New York Script Awards.
Buy tickets to the remaining showings of Girlfails’ limited run through July 19th. Also follow Lemonade Stand @lemonadestandphl on Instagram for updates on upcoming shows.
