GRIEF HOTEL Off-Broadway Reviews

Liza Birkenmeier’s Obie Award–winning play paints a gorgeously impressionistic picture of a group of acquaintances in loneliness, contemplation, and despair.

What’s more, this particular show is a sneaky marvel. Rather than handing you tidy packages of exposition, Grief Hotel trusts you to fall into an already rushing river, find a branch, and hang on.

Playwright Liza Birkenmeier doesn’t make it immediately easy to grasp the gist of her quirky play, Grief Hotel. It starts with Aunt Bobbi – Susan Blommaert, queen of the deadpan delivery – planted in her armchair stage left. Updating the layout after the show’s fleeting premiere at the cramped Wild Project last summer, the design collective dots has sliced the Public’s smallest stage into a sharp, shallow wedge, lending the fast-paced, one-act play – deftly directed by Tara Ahmadinejad – a splayed, in-your-face feel.

On the surface, this salacious cross-pollination might sound entertaining, but without enough exploration of these people or enough time to invest in the mess of their affairs, “Grief Hotel” feels more like a vague social experiment about impulse and desire than a provocative, character-driven piece of theater.