Nadine Malouf and Ana Nogueira in GRIEF HOTEL (Photo: Maria Baranova)
“Even if you have some long story, loss is fast, and grief is slow.”
Liza Birkenmeier’s play, Grief Hotel, from last summer, has received a li’l encore performance and what a gift it is if you missed it the first time around.
In a whirlwind of feelings, loss, desire, searching, and friendship, there’s so much unique beauty in Birkenmeier’s writing with hilarious characters we do not often meet. She paints them with the tiniest of strokes of specificity and the cast fills in the rest with flair. Tara Ahmadinejad’s colorful direction enhances this beguiling universe of time leaps and emotional wounds.
Birkenmeier establishes a circle of interconnected characters. 30-something Winn (Ana Nogueira) went to high school with Em (Nadine Malouf) and Rohit (Naren Weiss). She and Em dated. Now Em and Rohit are married. Winn is currently living with her partner Teresa (Susannah Perkins) but has started an affair with a former country music star and much older man, Asher (Bruce McKenzie).
Em’s energetic Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) is a test subject in a market research group and has a great idea for a hotel service. A grief hotel where “you get a luxury bespoke healing experience that is cut off from the obligations you would otherwise have and so you are able to get better a new way but also an old-fashioned way.” Aunt Bobbi imagines a poor befallen woman Penelope getting sent to the grief hotel by her rich friends (who will pay for the luxury experience) to partake in all sorts of healing activities. It will be exactly what each person needs.
Everyone here has something to grieve. Bobbi wants to reassure everyone, and herself, that whatever has happened to cause their loss they are not at fault.
Ahmadinejad has the characters lie in contorted sleeping poses against the wall as if the wall was the bed, lean against the wall and not face the audience, or slump to the ground. Characters remain on stage, not moving, even after their scenes have ended. These choices make us very conscious of bodies, space, memory, and the perpetual discomfort of being alive.
In interspliced scenes, phone calls, and texts, the character reveal themselves and the layered nature of their relationships. They can be abrupt, direct, and mean in the way that people who are comfortable with each other can be. Some of the comments are unexpected (and sometimes gaspingly funny) but these jabs and remarks are understood more comfortably by the recipients within these relationships. Each voice is different and they are entirely themselves.
The performances here are as bespoke as Aunt Bobbi’s vision of the Grief Hotel. Em is all aggression and aggravation with Malouf physically engulfing Winn at times, flopping to the floor like a pile o’ bones, and looking like she will explode as her eyes try to say and feel everything.
She’s a maelstrom of opinions, thoughts, and emotions and she can easily fall back into rhythm with Winn (in a kind of forever high school girls way) and never be that in sync with the calm, awkward, rock that is Rohit. While Em’s relentless energy could be off-putting, there is just something so lost about Malouf’s Em that it all makes sense. You see how she draws in the people around her even if she is often also shoving them away at the same time. Even if it is a bigger performance than the others, there is such intentional care in the choices she is making.
Weiss’s Rohan is always playing catch-up to everyone and the world around him. He has learned to let these women around him just go off and he observes, listens, and waits. There is a delicious bit of stage business when he is asking about an exorcism at Em’s parents’ house and whether they had demons in their cabinets. He just tentatively and in the tiniest way opens his hands to mimic, in his mind, cabinet demons–cabinet doors flying open.
At one point, Aunt Bobbi lets her dogs into the house and Perkins as Teresa (who does not like dogs) physically recoils as the imaginary dogs sniff around them. They play that kind of “If I don’t move they will leave me alone” stiffness with such authenticity you too think you can see the dogs.
These kinds of small but meaningful gestures really define this production. I’m going to have tiny cabinet demon hands in my mind forever.
I struggled a bit more with the Winn-Asher dynamic. Winn is an emotionally withholding character, which is hard to play. Her character’s intentions are opaque but Nogueira did not quite draw me in either. The vibe with McKenzie is supposed to be a kind of awkward dance of desire and that’s what they manage. But I could not help but feel there was something more plot necessitating about their relationship, whereas everyone else was more organic to this world Birkenmeier created. Or maybe it just didn’t reveal to me as much as the other relationships. It’s a tiny quibble in the larger scheme of the great work on display.
Susannah Perkins, Susan Blommaert, and Naren Weiss in GRIEF HOTEL (Photo: Maria Baranova)
Aunt Bobbi’s house is a refuge for so many of the characters. Even Teresa who has never met Aunt Bobbi, inexplicably, ends up at Aunt Bobbi’s house when it all comes crashing down. And Aunt Bobbi just accepts this inevitability.
Blommaert is a peppy, little steam train chugging along in this play. With an air of efficiency, impatience, and non-nonsense advice, she provides this space and a brusque understanding for all these lost kids. She does not dwell on the tragedies that have befallen her but they sit in this room with her and you can see them in Blommaert’s manner. She is not so much haunted but in co-existence with the losses.
With her absent looks into the distance, you understand how she comes up with the idea for a grief hotel and wants you to find your refuge there too. We all have things we need to heal and it takes time.