Em (Nadine Malouf, left) reacts to a wasp sting as her high school classmate, and future husband, Rohit (Naren Weiss), looks on, in Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel.
Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel was part of Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks program, and now comes to the Public Theater for a more extended engagement. This is great news, because the play very much deserves a longer look and wider audience. It is presented in partnership with New Georges, who produce “weird, weird-ish, and often impossible plays”; Grief Hotel is weird—gloriously so—but it’s not impossible. In fact, the strength of the play lies in Birkenmeier’s canny creation of an offbeat yet accessible style, thanks to her sharp ear for dialogue that is fundamentally naturalistic and works in productive combination with the play’s slightly surreal, collage-like structure, directed with bracing clarity by Tara Ahmadinejad.
Em with Winn (Ana Nogueira), a friend since high school with whom she was romantically involved in college.
The concept for a grief hotel is espoused by Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert), who speaks in a folksy staccato: “In the ideation session they told us to think a lot about the word bespoke so that’s what I did, so. This is a luxury and bespoke experience called the grief hotel. … You have activities to heal you. Little. Animals. Psychiatric. Evaluation. Professional. Astrology.” According to a note in the program, Birkenmeier once worked for an “innovation agency” and pitched the idea of a grief retreat: “I thought this was the best idea I’d ever had, if I only included ideas that I genuinely believed would be lucrative for multinational corporations.” The play is not simply a satire of corporate wellness speak, however, as it developed into something more difficult and more rewarding: “I wanted to write about the ridiculousness of corporatizing a feeling of ease. I accidentally wrote about—I think—the ridiculousness of desire.”
The desiring selves who inhabit the world of the play surround Aunt Bobbi (literally—the actors are almost never offstage, even when they are not participants in a given scene): Bobbi’s niece Em (Nadine Malouf) is unhappily married to the hapless Rohit (Naren Weiss). Em feels much closer to Melba, her AI chatbot, whom she envisions as a woman not dissimilar to Winn (Ana Nogueira), her high school friend and former lover, who is in the midst of starting an OkCupid dalliance with a married country singer named Asher (Bruce McKenzie), without the knowledge of her partner Teresa (Susannah Perkins), though they supposedly have an open relationship. Rohit was also in high school with Em and Winn, and Aunt Bobbi’s lake house served as the site of a group trauma that has left a deep, if unspoken, mark.
Winn with Asher (Bruce McKenzie), an older, married man she met on OkCupid. Photographs by Maria Baranova.
The conversations include spoken text messages, phone calls, and face-to-face interaction, the cadence of each expertly matching the medium; the conventions of texting are used with great effectiveness in Winn and Asher’s initial, awkward forays, especially as Asher tries to display good-natured openness despite his confusions over Winn’s sexuality and her relationship with her partner, who uses “they/them” pronouns: “You don’t look bisexual in your photos. lol.” The inability of the characters to fully articulate or understand the complexity of their own desires leads to small, keenly observed moments of hilarity. Foibles and neurotic tendencies take over—for example, when Teresa is trying to understand why Winn is upset, they immediately fall back on fixating over domestic minutiae: “Okay I’m throwing this away. And also the pasta thing you left in the thing.”
The action all takes place in a small, bland, triangular room (scenic design by the collective dots), which serves as many locations, including the lake house, where Bobbi spends much of her time in a lounge chair, bemused by the problems of the younger cohort, and fleshing out her idea for the grief hotel boutique experience. Time is fluid, conversations seem mediated by memory, and yet everything is clear (which doesn’t mean there are easy answers). Most impressive is how perfectly each actor is in sync with the rhythms of Birkenmeier’s writing, which allows, for example, Em’s befuddled, sarcastic “cool are you okay?” when Winn is not properly recounting a story to generate the biggest laugh (of many) of the night.
There is specific grieving that needs to happen for the characters, but also a sense, as communicated by Bobbi, that it is so universal as to not always require details: “I don’t feel any need to tell you what makes my problems different than anybody else’s. But I assume … that you can understand.” This sentiment draws the audience into the messy, fraught, and funny reunion at Bobbi’s that concludes the play—a gathering suffused with sorrow and the pains and confusions of desire, but not without hope. At a brisk 75 minutes, you might wish your stay at the Grief Hotel could be extended.
Grief Hotel runs through April 27 at The Public’s Shiva Theater (425 Lafayette St.). Evening performances are 7:30 p.m. Monday–Saturday; matinees are 3 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are available at www.clubbedthumb.org.
Playwright: Liza Birkenmeier
Director: Tara Ahmadinejad
Sets: dots
Lighting: Masha Tsimring
Costumes: Mel Ng
Sound Design & Composition: Jordan McCree
