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★★★★☆ “Decline is rapidly, and grief is slow…. At the grief resort, you get to prevent time.”
Playwright Liza Birkenmeier doesn’t make it promptly uncomplicated to grasp the gist of her quirky engage in, Grief Hotel. It starts off with Aunt Bobbi – Susan Blommaert, queen of the deadpan shipping – planted in her armchair phase left. Updating the layout soon after the show’s fleeting premiere at the cramped Wild Project previous summer, the style collective dots has sliced the Public’s smallest phase into a sharp, shallow wedge, lending the fast-paced, a single-act enjoy – deftly directed by Tara Ahmadinejad – a splayed, in-your-face experience.
Although pointing at an imaginary monitor wherever a stage curtain would ordinarily be, Bobbi launches into a pitch for her latest brainstorm: a luxurious hotel catering to youthful people dealing with profound decline. Whom precisely is she addressing (other than us)? You’ll have to hold out for it: She’s seemingly participating in a some type of shopper panel (“ideation session”) for a major hospitality chain. Established to seize the moment, Bobbi rattles off her suggestions at breakneck speed. She’s savvy more than enough to drop some buzzwords (e.g., “bespoke”) and tick off all the wellness modalities that she thinks could possibly establish valuable, from crystals to … karaoke? (Hold out for it.)
Thirtyish Winn (Ana Nogueira) is ostensibly partnered up with the slightly young Teresa (Susannah Perkins). Realistic, unflappable, Teresa can make a point of hating games – but she’ll show a tiger at charades.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★★ review here.]
While Winn self-identifies as homosexual, she embarks on an on the internet flirtation with a seemingly typical-challenge middle-aged male (Bruce McKenzie), who’s sufficient of a fossil to punctuate his texts with random LOLs. On the area, Winn’s decision to go stay – have an affair, that is, in the flesh – helps make no feeling. However, she and her entire circle of friends are however reeling from a devastating function they all witnessed back in superior university.
Roped into this fraying community are Winn’s former bestie Em (intensely physical Nadine Malouf), who’s seething with frustration and boredom about a disappointing partnership with the endlessly accommodating Rohit (Naren Weiss). On the full, Em far prefers the companionship of “an AI bot identified as Melba.”
A person much more classmate, unseen, has long gone incommunicado, triggering gentle consternation amid his friends.
All the vectors will little by little coalesce, and though you’re occupied puzzling it out, you get to enjoy an immensely talented octet bounce off one particular one more in surprising methods. That middle-aged on the web Lothario, for occasion? He turns out to be a real romantic: Winn gets the all-in adoration that for some explanation she has been craving.
As mentor and would-be healer, Aunt Bobbi does her most effective to soothe and reorient these younger people today, whom she has occur to enjoy – but she does so drily, accommodatingly, without having a grain of saccharinity.
Birkenmeier, who served shape Jill Sobule’s going/hilarious solo show Fuck 7th Quality, captures all the confusion and chaos of a quarter-life disaster – that awkward developmental phase when the newly adult may possibly experience larval and shed.
Aunt Bobbi provides a coda to her Grief Resort spiel: “You might want to transform that identify,” she advises her presumed viewers, “because it doesn’t exactly seem pleasant.” On the contrary: The play that offers and encases her notion unquestionably is.
Grief Hotel opened March 27, 2024, at the Public Theater and operates by way of April 27. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
