Brooklyn (from Manhattan) is from a family of performers and is spending her first summer at a renowned theater festival. She can act and sing, but she prefers playing the piano. She hopes her summer at Allerdale will awaken the love of performing that everyone else in her family's orbit seems to share.
Her Allerdale roommate, Zoe, is everything Brooklyn thinks her parents want her to be. Kim is so talented she gets a major role on the main stage, even though both girls are company apprentices. (There are also a non-equity and an equity troupe in the company.) Brooklyn, Brookie to her parents, is the only high school student on the scene and is not as well cast as Zoe. She spends a lot of time on stage crews. To my delight, her first rotation is electrics, and the writer shares in her acknowledgments that she was a lighting designer.
In addition to having it all, talent-wise, Zoe quickly makes friends with the other apprentices and has a boyfriend back home. Brooklyn and Zoe bond, and Brooklyn finds herself crushing on Zoe. She's never been attracted to a girl before, despite her mother's encouragement, but Zoe has.
I won't say anything else for fear of spoiling the story for you, but I do want to share this passage from about 1/4 of the way in, which I related to, in that I ultimately deemed theater unworthy of stress.
The director looks so stressed out that if I saw him on the street, I'd assume he'd been in court all day, trying to get innocent people off death row.