'Grief Camp' Off-Broadway review — a brilliant exploration of grief in everyday life
Read our review of Grief Camp off Broadway, a new play at Atlantic Theater Company written by Eliya Smith and directed by Les Waters, running through May 11.
One thing people tend to omit when talking about bereavement is the banality that comes with it. The thing happens — a loved one dies and just disappears from your life — and, though much changes in that person's absence, one just has to plod on to the next day. The disorienting part of experiencing this loss at an early age, like the teenage characters in Eliya Smith’s buzzingly brilliant Grief Camp do, is that while your life objectively shifts, so much of it doesn’t. The transformation happens in a slow trickle.
Smith is profoundly attuned to this uncanny mutation of the everyday in death’s shadow. Much of the play takes place in a cabin where the teens address and avoid reality in equal turns at night, when they are so jittery with thoughts and hormones they can’t fall asleep. In the dark, they can be honest with themselves or each other about how they feel. Even as they try to conceal it beneath jokes or Duolingo streaks, death’s unhurried presence still lingers. The screen door swings open as a winking reminder.
Smith, director Les Waters, and the cast believably articulate the way people who experience death at an early age are not just forced to grow up, but also to balance two consciousnesses: the one where they’re teenagers aspiring to get out of their small towns by creating a fiction of themselves, and the one where they’re newly, starkly aware of death’s inevitability.
None of the characters wallow in self-pity. Most of the teens have experiences (Blue is writing a one-person musical, Olivia is thinking about college, Gideon is growing out of his stuffed animal) that are, refreshingly, almost irrelevant to the deaths. Smith’s coup is showing that the tentacles of bereavement snake around those parts, too, but in a way that gives the teens a new perspective on what they want and how they want to achieve it.
Renee-Nicole Powell, as spiky and provocative Olivia, and Maaike Laanstra-Corn, as ambitious and occasionally brooding Blue, acutely encapsulate the way grieving teens launder their feelings into other actions and desires. Even fleeting thoughts of suicide, shouted into a rickety fan that turns their voice into a chopped-up echo, are prosaic and, if not easily managed, at least prioritized below the parts of their lives they find more compelling: sex, beauty, avoiding the chores on the campground.
Grief Camp offers a strikingly unsentimental and thoughtful panorama of young people who refuse to let grief hold them back from living. The play takes seriously the idea that death can be more pedestrian than cataclysmic in the moment, and that is where the emotion lies.
Grief Camp summary
A group of teenagers spend the summer at a grief camp, getting to know one another, talking to the resident counselor on campus, and figuring out where their lives will take them from here. Between activities, group meals, and chores, the characters come to terms with how the deaths of their loved ones echo in their day-to-day activities, and whether they want to confront the loneliness, and potential for connection, that offers.
What to expect at Grief Camp
Playwright Eliya Smith has a sharp ear for the conversational rhythms of young people without overplaying their slang. While characters hang out or take breathers in the cabin, they talk over one another, tell secrets, and disclose how death has shaped who they want to be and how. Scenes gently waltz from conversation to conversation, concealing the drama in careful glances, changes in tone of voice, and the indiscretion of adolescence.
What audiences are saying about Grief Camp
Audiences on the review aggregator Show-Score have shared mixed responses to Grief Camp, with 44 reviews from theatregoers averaging into a 68% audience approval rating.
- “This brilliant new play is my favorite Off Broadway event of the new year. Though it deals with serious themes including death and grief, it manages to remain totally understated and constantly surprising, with a sense that there’s an ocean of emotions just waiting to erupt underneath the surface.” - Show-Score user GreatAvi
- “This is an ambitious show that has a lot to say but feels underdeveloped. Some characters remain mysteries, and some of the scenes, while realistic, were somewhat boring as they focused on grieving teens going through motions of life. While this acknowledges that life goes on even while grieving, it doesn’t necessarily make for engaging theater.” - Show-Score user MaxD
- “Grief Camp is mostly a tease. So little was actually enlightening, and so much was random, that the title felt like a manipulative move to add gravitas to this unfocused work.” - Show-Score user aka
Read more audience reviews of Grief Camp on Show-Score.
Who should see Grief Camp
- Audiences looking for a show that takes adolescents seriously will be pleased at its willingness to grant its teen characters interiority without too much exposition or condescension.
- Theatergoers looking for new voices will find Eliya Smith a bold and compassionate one, with a dynamic ear for how young people talk without cliche.
- Anyone who has experienced bereavement, particularly at a young age, will marvel at the show’s insights about how death doesn’t stop people in their tracks.
Learn more about Grief Camp
Many shows about death and grief lean on melodrama, but Grief Camp feels revelatory in its lack of preciousness and willingness to meet its adolescent ensemble on their own terms: sometimes frantic, but usually able to fold death into everything else that sucks about being a teen. Its dispassionate take on bereavement grants its characters agency, and even more so, leaves its audience to find the tenderness beneath what isn’t said.
Photo credit: Grief Camp off Broadway. (Photos by Ahron R. Foster)
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