Grief Hotel, Where You Check In to Yourself

What would we do without Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks? For almost 30 years Maria Striar’s badass downtown company and its annual festival has been a springboard for some of the most exciting new plays and playwrights in the country. Sarah Ruhl and Lisa D’Amour made their New York debuts at Summerworks, and more recently, it’s brought us Clare Barron’s Baby Screams Miracle, Agnes Borinsky’s Of Government, Will Arbery’s Plano, and Heidi Schreck’s all-the-way-to-Broadway rocket What the Constitution Means to Me, the most-produced play in the U.S. this past season. Now Clubbed Thumb has teamed with New Georges and the Public to bring back Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel, which got a special citation from the Obies after its Summerworks debut last year. Even if the play weren’t as outstanding as it is, the circumstance would be thrilling: This kind of institutional collaboration — especially among theaters of varying scales, and for plays that aren’t being developed in the hope of big commercial debuts — isn’t always the norm, and we’re seeing a lot of it right now. It’s the kind of resource sharing and generous lateral thinking that this industry desperately needs.

What’s more, this particular show is a sneaky marvel. Rather than handing you tidy packages of exposition, Grief Hotel trusts you to fall into an already rushing river, find a branch, and hang on. This requires a period of biorhythmic adjustment at the start. Don’t flail or clench too tightly: Just let it carry you for a bit. It is, after all, in many ways a show about surrender. In the words of Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) — who may be an otherworldly font of infinite wisdom or simply an eccentric, practical-sweater-wearing dog lover from the Midwest — “loss is fast, and grief is slow.” Grieving strands your mind somewhere behind the present; your experience can’t “catch up with reality,” and so you’re in pain, such terrible pain, because the one thing you can’t achieve is “a more controlled experience of time.”

With a sense of cosmic irony, Birkenmeier takes the timelines of her characters, cracks them into fragments, and reshuffles them. (What is writing if not an attempt, however knowingly transient, to control time, to give order to experience?) For a while, we watch various presents interpenetrate along with snippets of past and a few snatches that perhaps exist in no time at all, except the time we’re all sharing together here in the theater. Unshuffled, the six lives in front of us look essentially like this: There’s Winn (Ana Nogueira), Em (Nadine Malouf), and Rohit (Naren Weiss), a trio whose lives have intertwined since high school somewhere in what’s most likely rural Missouri (Birkenmeier is from St. Louis and describes the “unsettling and soothing ecosystem” of her home state in an online program note). The intense, self-dramatizing Em and the unmoored but also unreactive and unironic Rohit are married but maybe not for much longer. Em and Winn had a thing in college and are back in touch by phone after a couple years of not talking. Winn has moved back out to the sticks where they all grew up — and not too far from Em’s aunt Bobbi — because her partner, the competent, cute, and vaguely complacent Teresa (Susannah Perkins, who should be cast in every show), got a job. Winn is also beginning an affair with Asher (Bruce McKenzie), an older man she’s met on OkCupid, who turns out to be a formerly quite famous country singer. “Oh my God, we played that one song — he has that one song — I think we played it at my graduation party,” says Em on the phone.

Significantly, Em doesn’t actually say it — or anything — into a phone. There are almost no objects in director Tara Ahmadinejad’s delicate, haunted staging. Birkenmeier’s characters inhabit a tight, triangular slice of a beige room, like a wedge out of a really boring cheese wheel; there are two chairs, a bench, and an aggressively characterless standing lamp on a carpet that feels like it belongs in a Holiday Inn. All six of them are, almost always, there, but more often than not, and despite the closeness of the space, each one is an island. As they talk by phone or by text, Ahmadinejad quietly dramatizes the devastation of chronic apartness. When not involved in a scene, the actors stare neutrally into space or curl up against the walls. Even when two characters share the same physical reality for a moment — as when Em and Rohit clear out their failed bakery business or Winn starts meeting up with Asher at his house — their bodies feel out of sync, separated by leagues of psychic distance. “I could really use some physical touch,” Asher texts Winn. “I really do not want us to be sweet to each other, ever,” she warns him later on. “The only person I talk to now is an AI bot called Melba,” Em admits. “The worst feelings in the world,” says Aunt Bobbi, “… are all pretty much loneliness.”

Blommaert’s blunt, birdlike Bobbi is unceremoniously terrific at the center of a cast that’s all nailing the play’s stylistic demand: its need for its actors to skate over an extremely dark lake on the thin ice of humor and human oddity. Not, it should be said, quirkiness: Grief Hotel is blessedly uncute, and if its characters sometimes have a whiff of Wes Anderson, it’s because they share with that director’s better creations a sense of deep existential haplessness. Birkenmeier takes this bemused disquietude and adds a painfully contemporary twist: “Ever since I was incredibly young, I was so worried that I was going to express something wrong, or bad,” says Winn. “So I practiced crushing my devotion … is maybe a way to say it? I got very good at that? And then I got this idea that I was a fundamentally unemotional person, and I still think, I always think that everyone else is being hysterical when they express any feeling …”

Loss can also be loss of self, and what exactly Winn — and everyone else — is grieving unfolds itself bit by deftly orchestrated bit. But the what isn’t the point: “We’re all experts in loss,” writes Birkenmeier in the program. Or, as Aunt Bobbi puts it, “I don’t feel the need to tell you what makes my problems different than anybody else’s.” Bobbi has, all throughout the show, been stealing moments to sell us on a business idea. Wildly, this is an idea that Birkenmeier herself came up with in what theater people sometimes bitterly call Real Life for what theater people sometimes bitterly call an Actual Job. That job was, “as a ‘Creative Consumer’ for an ‘innovation agency,’” to brainstorm ways for rich corporations to get richer. Birkenmeier’s idea was for the titular Grief Hotel, aimed at young people and pitched thus by Aunt Bobbi:

“This is a luxury and bespoke experience … You can go there if your sibling gets deathly sick, or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter, etcetera … The Grief Hotel includes: wellness, health, well-being, holistic well-being, body positivity … I think, but I don’t know what that is. Sustainability, Brené Brown, personality tests –slash–astrology, privacy, intimacy, sensory experience, story, love, community, empowerment, identity, green food, origins, origin stories, ethically sourced food, ethically sourced food origin stories …” It’s hard to stop quoting — with their powers combined, Birkenmeier and Blommaert are seriously hilarious, drier than prairie grass in fire season. The idea itself — that monetizing grief is maybe the only way left for a company to mine more cash from millennials and Gen-Zers — is already funny as actual hell, and Bobbi’s binder full of details only makes it that much more stinging. “People will spend money on anything that looks like it’s from between 1994 to 2004,” she suggests helpfully; “so I was thinking, Why not make it look like it’s the ’90s … Everyone wants comfort, so everyone wants the ’90s.”

Grief Hotel heads in too wonderful a direction to spoil the particulars, but its emotional power — and the thing that necessitates and elevates it specifically as a piece of theater — is the way in which we bear witness to the eventual merging of islands. Circumstances conspire to lead the play’s lonely souls en masse to Bobbi’s lake house, and the sudden rush of actual togetherness is palpable: It overflows the narrow, neutral stage space in a great wave. We’re pulled into it; when prompted to speak along with the characters, we do. It feels a little silly, a little heady. Suddenly, it’s a game, a party, unmediated and messy, real bodies really there with and for each other. There have been moments in Birkenmeier’s play when a character shrieks so loud it makes us jump, although it’s never a real emergency — someone’s been stung by a wasp and is now cursing and pacing and rubbing the wound. Each time, another character talks to them gently, puts a hand on the sting, and just stands there with them for a moment. The hurt is immediate and comes out of nowhere. The healing is gradual and awkward and takes touch just as much as it takes time.

Grief Hotel is at the Public Theater, presented by Clubbed Thumb and New Georges, through April 20.