Susannah Perkins, Naren Weiss, and Susan Blommaert in Grief Hotel. Photo: Marcus Middleton

There is an actual Grief Hotel, or at least a pitch for a marketing concept called the Grief Hotel, in Liza Birkenmeier’s play of the same title, the final work in Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks season. But for most of the play, it feels like that marketing concept operates as armature rather than content, a parallel thread that braids an exoskeleton around the apparent action among two young couples. But the heart of the piece lies in how the one sneaks up on the other–in how grief of the past and of the present reveals itself at the heart of everything, even in this wry and very funny play. 

Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert), an older woman whom Birkenmeier’s script simply describes as “a force,” works as a “hired consumer,” and she’s been placed in a focus group trying to make a large hotel chain attractive to a younger generation. What she’s pitching (via a picture book whose illustrations we never get to see; the play only lightly sketches in its physical objects and environments) is the Grief Hotel: an “exclusive luxury bespoke experience” where you can go for a retreat to heal your soul from any kind of grief–death, of course, but also if someone close to you is terminally ill, or the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter (the people in this play can pretty easily imagine that most of their loved ones might commit manslaughter under the necessary circumstances). Your friends have to get together and pay for the Grief Hotel, of course, because who in the target demographic has that kind of money these days? 

Bobbi conjures a baroque story of tragedy for her archetypal customer, a young woman who dropped her baby on its head and now has to live with a severely disabled child, but she’s got plenty of experience with grief closer to home, as the play gradually reveals. In the past: Bobbi threw a high-school graduation party for her niece, Em (Nadine Malouf), where someone died, and Em still speaks of the party as cursed. In the present: Em’s marriage to Rohit (Naren Weiss) is on the rocks and she’s finding more emotional connection with a chatbot named Melba than she has with another person since she and Winn were together. Em might be a bit of a sociopath, and Bobbi tends to like Rohit better these days. Rohit’s dream business has just failed. An earthquake has done some serious damage to their area. And a local man, who went to high school with Em, Rohit, and Em’s semi-estranged friend/ex-girlfriend Winn (Ana Nogueira), has disappeared. (Em hates him–Em hates everyone, mostly; Rohit remembers him fondly from high school, and Winn maybe went on a date with him once, but, like a sore tooth you can’t stop poking with your tongue, they can’t stop bringing him up, even though–or perhaps especially because–Winn’s ever-pragmatic new partner thinks he must be dead.) 

Meanwhile, Winn has moved back to her hometown with that partner, Teresa (Susannah Perkins), for Teresa’s job. Winn is at loose ends, especially compared to Teresa’s seeming certainty about everything, so she winds up simultaneously trying to make herself happy in that relationship and connecting with straight men on dating apps, looking for a way to feel something new. But when she meets Asher (Bruce McKenzie), a married country musician with a really nice house, she feels more than she planned to. And when she loses him, the repercussions will affect them all. 

This all sounds heavy, and yet, while there’s a lot of dark material on the table here, the whole has a remarkable lightness of touch–it’s acerbically funny, sharply observed, and surprisingly delicate. Birkenmeier has a careful ear for the weirdness of people and of language: of the rhythm of unfinished sentences and inadvertently revealing tossed-off lines; of complex emotions and the ways people react to other people’s odd behaviors. Most of the play is a sequence of intimate two-character scenes (woven through with Bobbie’s pitch), but when the old friends, Aunt Bobbi, and Teresa come together in a game of charades at the end, it’s utterly awful, utterly hilarious, and oddly sweet all at once: the web of connections and frustrations among these people is on beautiful display: Teresa’s disavowed competitiveness and their intimacy with Winn; Em and Winn’s years of history; Rohit’s dogged sincerity; Bobbi’s weary impatience. In under 90 minutes, Birkenmeier gives us rich, full people whose relationships are knotty and complex even in their subtext. 

Director Tara Ahmedinejad has a similar delicate precision with the actors. Ana Nogueira’s Winn and Bruce McKenzie’s Asher, in particular, zigzag toward and away from each other with an intense intimacy that frightens them a little; you can see their own knowledge of the danger they’re in even as they push on toward knowing each other. Nogueira and Nadine Malouf’s Em hit perfectly that stage of friendship where the reflex of how well you know someone has overtaken any consideration of how you actually feel about them–especially because both also let us see the gaping hollowness inside both characters, which Winn seeks to fill with sensation and Em often with cruelty. And Susannah Perkins as Teresa should feel like the outsider: the third wheel in two triangles (Asher and Winn and the exes Winn and Em); the one without twenty-plus years of history together. Instead, Perkins brings a quiet confidence and a sly joy to Theresa’s pragmatism and get-on-with-it attitude; they infuse every line and facial expression with nuance. 

The whole play takes place in a bland triangular space, which even the actors not in a given scene rarely leave, instead remaining slumped against walls or sprawled on the floor as if unconscious. It’s a diagonal cross-section of a neutral room that evokes a chain hotel both because of Masha Tsimring’s studiously cool lighting and because of the carefully bland patterns on the carpets, wallpaper, and furnishings of dots’ set. The real ceiling serves both to add an uneasy sense of containment to the proceedings and to mean that there’s no way to light the space from above; shadows are literally omnipresent. (Mei Ng’s costumes break that neutrality in a few very odd ways that I did find distracting.) The visual metaphor works: these are people trying to get free of shadows, trying to figure out how to make their way back into the world.

“At the Grief Hotel you get to stop time a little bit,” Birkenmeier writes. “Loss is fast but grief is slow.” Grief Hotel runs a tight eighty minutes–stopping time, a little bit–but it encapsulates both the fastness of loss and the slowness of grief.