Theatre in Review: Grief Hotel (Clubbed Thump at the Public Theater)

	Susannah Perkins, Naren Weiss, Susan Blommaert. Photo: Maria Baranova

Say hello to Bobbi, a lady of a certain age working on a marketing pitch to a hotel chain, positioning it as an attractive place to decompress after tragedy. Employing standard advertising-industry practice, she presents the fictitious case history of Penelope, a young woman who drops her baby on its head, causing irreversible brain damage. Concerned about this irreversible loss, her friends get together and plan a tropical getaway to help her heal. I can't wait to see this scenario laid out in the pages of Vanity Fair.

Then there's the thirtysomething Winn, who says she is queer -- don't ask her to define the term; it's just too hard -- but who flirts online with Asher, a middle-aged married man with whom she is soon having a weirdly uninvolving affair. ("Would it feel objectifying if I told you that I'm really just looking for a novel experience of pleasure?" she asks. "That's actually really hot," he replies.) It's the most hands-off adultery you've likely ever seen, although it certainly works for them.

In time, Winn will discover that Asher is a famous country music singer, whose signature hit -- nobody can ever quite remember the title -- is a classic earworm. (Steel yourself for a blisteringly loud karaoke sequence.) Winn has a partner, Teresa, but in addition to sleeping with Asher, she can't stop texting Em, her ex, who is hooked up with a man named Rohit. The center of Em's life, however, is Melba, an AI bot who claims to see the afterlife. Em, by the way, is Bobbi's niece, which explains why the action moves to the latter's lake house where we learn about Evan, who pushed Em into the lake and subsequently ran into a glass door, killing herself. Also in the cards is a car crash that will have unpleasant repercussions for Winn and Teresa's relationship. And what about Stanley Chi, a friend to most of these characters, who has inexplicably disappeared?

These are the people you will meet if you check into Grief Hotel and what a sorry, scattered lot they are. Playwright Liza Birkenmeier creates a tale of tangled lives delivered in a series of flat-affect monologues and exchanges; it's a stream-of-consciousness tally of life in the 2020s, a world in which virtually anything can be marketed, relationships are mostly transactional and unfulfilling, and communication is largely digital, a format that flattens and banalizes even the most intimate thoughts. Love is strikingly absent and sexual cheating is just one more item on these busy multitaskers' agendas.

With its dry detachment and straight-faced sense of the ridiculous, Grief Hotel recalls several recent plays that traffic in a kind of absurdism lite, offering brief observations about modern sexual manners while indulging in a faint, low-level dread. (Other examples include Will Arbery's Plano and the complete works of Will Eno.) As in Dr. Ride's American Beach House, seen in 2019, Birkenmeier has a distinctive voice, finding oddball humor in the juxtaposition of disaster and everyday objects. (Winn, remembering a sort-of date with the missing Stanley, notes, "He brought something horrible." "Like a gun?" asks the alarmed Em. "Lunchables," Winn replies.) But, also as in Dr. Rides..., the action is listless, static, and starved for meaningful action. If I had to guess, I'd say that Birkenmeier is trying to emulate the deadpan effect of Ann Beattie's novels and stories, in which slackers stumble through ludicrous and/or saddening experiences on their way to nowhere in particular. Such a style is much easier to reproduce on a page, however; in the theatre, something has to happen, or boredom will set in.

That's what happens here, despite solid direction by Tara Ahmadinejad and a cast that includes Susan Blommaert, creatively spinning horrific scenarios as Aunt Bobbi; Bruce McKenzie as Asher, earning a laugh by accidentally inserting a comment about oral sex into a conversation between Winn and Teresa; Nadine Malouf as Em, walking into a wall in a moment of irritation; Ana Nogueira as Winn, negotiating her increasingly complicated personal life with eerie aplomb; Naren Weiss as Rohit, whose idea of a cleanse consists of "weed candy and old bread;" and Susannah Perkins as Teresa, the closest thing the play has to a voice of reason. (At the performance I attended two days after the ground moved in the Northeast, Malouf got a big laugh when, following a loud rumbling on the sound system, she asked, "Was that an earthquake?" The actors reacted unflappably.)

The script calls for the play to be staged in an anonymous space and that's what the scenic collective dots delivers, a thin slice of a room that, amusingly, puts the far-flung characters into proximity. Masha Tsimring's lighting consists of diffuse, delicately tinted washes that occasionally make the actors a little hard to make out. Mel Ng's costumes are deftly personalized examples of contemporary casual wear. The sound design and music by Jordan McCree include a preshow playlist that includes "This Kiss" by Faith Hill as well as that highly effective earthquake; he could tone down the screeching in the karaoke scene, however.

"I wanted to write about the ridiculousness of corporatizing a feeling of ease," Birkenmeier writes in a program note. "I accidentally wrote about -- I think -- the ridiculousness of desire." That sounds about right, and it provides a clue as to why the play disappoints. There's little doubt that Birkenmeier has a distinctly comic point of view; her book for the Jill Sobule bio-musical F*ck 7th Grade was reliably hilarious and life-affirming. But there's something distressingly easy and unambitious about Grief Hotel, which feels more like a collection of aperçus than a play. Its studied cool is ultimately off-putting; it feels entirely too pleased with itself, as if it doesn't need an audience to respond. --David Barbour