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Grief Hotel, Where You Check In to Yourself
Liza Birkenmeier’s discontinuous, fragmented play imagines a quasi-spa marketed to anyone experiencing loss.
Sarah Ruhl and Lisa D’Amour made their New York debuts at Summerworks, and more recently, it’s brought us Clare Barron’s Baby Screams Miracle, Agnes Borinsky’s Of Government, Will Arbery’s Plano, and Heidi Schreck’s all-the-way-to-Broadway rocket What the Constitution Means to Me, the most-produced play in the U.S. this past season. Birkenmeier’s characters inhabit a tight, triangular slice of a beige room, like a wedge out of a really boring cheese wheel; there are two chairs, a bench, and an aggressively characterless standing lamp on a carpet that feels like it belongs in a Holiday Inn. Circumstances conspire to lead the play’s lonely souls en masse to Bobbi’s lake house, and the sudden rush of actual togetherness is palpable: It overflows the narrow, neutral stage space in a great wave.
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