Playwright Liza Birkenmeier doesn’t make it immediately easy to grasp the gist of her quirky play, Grief Hotel. It starts with Aunt Bobbi – Susan Blommaert, queen of the deadpan delivery – planted in her armchair stage left. Updating the layout after the show’s fleeting premiere at the cramped Wild Project last summer, the design collective dots has sliced the Public’s smallest stage into a sharp, shallow wedge, lending the fast-paced, one-act play – deftly directed by Tara Ahmadinejad – a splayed, in-your-face feel.
While pointing at an imaginary screen where a stage curtain would ordinarily be, Bobbi launches into a pitch for her latest brainstorm: a luxury hotel catering to young people dealing with profound loss. Whom exactly is she addressing (besides us)? You’ll have to wait for it: She’s apparently participating in a some kind of consumer panel (“ideation session”) for a major hospitality chain. Determined to seize the moment, Bobbi rattles off her recommendations at breakneck speed. She’s savvy enough to drop some buzzwords (e.g., “bespoke”) and tick off all the wellness modalities that she thinks might prove helpful, from crystals to … karaoke? (Wait for it.)
Thirtyish Winn (Ana Nogueira) is ostensibly partnered up with the slightly younger Teresa (Susannah Perkins). Practical, unflappable, Teresa makes a point of hating games – but she’ll prove a tiger at charades.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★★ review here.]
Although Winn self-identifies as gay, she embarks on an online flirtation with a seemingly standard-issue middle-aged man (Bruce McKenzie), who’s enough of a fossil to punctuate his texts with random LOLs. On the surface, Winn’s decision to go live – have an affair, that is, in the flesh – makes no sense. However, she and her whole circle of friends are still reeling from a devastating event they all witnessed back in high school.
Roped into this fraying network are Winn’s former bestie Em (intensely physical Nadine Malouf), who’s seething with frustration and boredom over a disappointing partnership with the endlessly accommodating Rohit (Naren Weiss). On the whole, Em far prefers the companionship of “an AI bot called Melba.”
One more classmate, unseen, has gone incommunicado, causing mild consternation among his peers.
All the vectors will gradually coalesce, and while you’re busy puzzling it out, you get to watch an immensely talented octet bounce off one another in surprising ways. That middle-aged online Lothario, for instance? He turns out to be a true romantic: Winn gets the all-in adoration that for some reason she has been craving.
As mentor and would-be healer, Aunt Bobbi does her best to soothe and reorient these young people, whom she has come to love – but she does so drily, accommodatingly, without a grain of saccharinity.
Birkenmeier, who helped shape Jill Sobule’s moving/hilarious solo show Fuck 7th Grade, captures all the confusion and chaos of a quarter-life crisis – that awkward developmental stage when the newly adult may feel larval and lost.
Aunt Bobbi adds a coda to her Grief Hotel spiel: “You might want to change that name,” she advises her presumed audience, “because it doesn’t exactly sound delightful.” On the contrary: The play that quotes and encases her notion absolutely is.
Grief Hotel opened March 27, 2024, at the Public Theater and runs through April 27. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
