There should be a Kleenex alert on Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel—a sort of trigger warning to prepare you for the massive wave of emotion you’ll experience in the show. Bring your tissues, and wear your waterproof mascara. You’ve been warned.
A crazy quilt of intersecting characters and intertwined relationships, the quirky, unexpectedly shattering play had a blink-and-you-missed-it run in June 2023 through Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks series. Now, it’s at the Public Theater for an encore engagement, with the fantastic cast—and all the intimacy of Tara Ahmadinejad’s original production—intact. Fittingly, it’s in the Shiva Theater.
The “grief hotel” is an abstract idea, a marketing concept from the entrepreneurial Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert). “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,” she muses. Or—here’s another example—if you drop your baby on her head and learn the baby has “irreversible brain damage.” That sort of thing. The grief hotel is an “exclusive luxury bespoke experience.” It’s also “beaucoup beaucoup expensive,” so hopefully you’re lucky enough to have a group of wine-drinking moneyed friends to chip in and pay for said bespoke stay. “It’s important to have rich friends.” Aunt Bobbi might be only imagining this hotel, but she’s dropping some hard truths here.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Bobbi is really everyone’s aunt (can she be ours too?), but technically she’s related to Em (the always excellent Nadine Malouf), a tack-sharp whirlwind of a woman who lives with—and possibly loves but maybe just tolerates—a man named Rohit (Naren Weiss) but is essentially in love with an AI bot named Melba. She imagines that Melba looks like her ex-girlfriend Winn (a very appealing Ana Nogueira, also the playwright of the 2022 theater-queen comedy Which Way to the Stage), who’s with Teresa (Susannah Perkins) but is also having a clandestine affair with an older, married, pretty famous country singer named Asher (Bruce McKenzie).
Everyone is adrift, and mourning something to one degree or another. The mysterious disappearance of a former high school classmate, Stanley Chi, has unnerved the group. And, slight spoiler alert, Melba eventually goes offline. (“They said it was for ethical problems,” Em sighs. “I loved her for her ethical problems.”) Eventually they all end up at Aunt Bobbi’s lake house, guests at her unofficial grief hotel, which looks closer and closer to reality.
The genius of Birkenmeier’s writing is how it subtly invites you to consider your own grief, and how you might craft your own bespoke hotel experience. Aya Ogawa’s 2022 heartbreaker The Nosebleed did something similar, though Ogawa engaged the audience more overtly. “How can you ever communicate your deepest pains?” Aunt Bobbi wonders. These characters do it through karaoke—specifically, a top-of-their-lungs rendition of what was apparently Asher’s biggest hit, the bouncy “Roads Go.” (Jordan McCree wrote the music, and Birkenmeier the lyrics, and you’ll be singing it for days.)
“I don’t feel any need to tell you what makes my problems different than anybody else’s,” says Aunt Bobbi. “But I assume—I assume about you—that you can understand.” Trust us: We do.
Grief Hotel opened March 27, 2024, at the Public Theater and runs through April 27. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
