Grief Camp Off-Broadway Reviews

It’s a remarkably lived-in play. You have the sense that Smith built her world in granular detail, establishing a hefty biography for each camper, tracking everyone’s location at all times over the 15-day span of the action. The design enhances this sense of place and the lazy, dreamy passing of time... Grief Camp is a banquet of perfectly meshed design, fully inhabited by the lovable, convincing cast.

Smith’s writing shines brightest in small units, be they sentences or scenes. The six teenagers at her imagined grief camp — a ramshackle labor of love run out of the home of its founder Rocky (voiced by Danny Wolohan), who remains unseen but asserts a deeply earnest, increasingly surreal presence over the camp loudspeaker — are all weird normies, ordinary weirdos.

Grief Camp proves so elliptical and amorphous in its writing that it seems to drift along without providing anything to hold your attention, unless you’re riveted by the sight of young people fighting to get into their cabin’s sole bathroom.

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.

The play is composed of dozens of brief seemingly disconnected scenes that resist any traditional arc. Don’t expect a protagonist’s journey or a narrative climax. What you get instead is a string of moments—each a tiny pearl—that, taken together, form a quietly resonant necklace of meaning. But be warned: those craving linear clarity may find their patience tested.

The effect is almost that of skipping through security camera footage, or a timelapse carefully calibrated between the lighting’s cuts. That need-to-know basis is also how we get to know the campers... A stunning sequence finds them all haphazardly exorcising their emotions during a thunderstorm... emblematic of the whole play – is that they all act as if on psychedelics; as if each is undergoing something immense and overwhelming but cannot express it, left alone to wander through a subjective experience where the cleanest path forward is through, and through impulse alone.

Grief Camp creates a vivid, fully inhabited world and assembles conditions ripe for drama, but never shapes them into a story. Without conflict or progression, the play drifts, looping through the passing days. And really, instead of these kids, I left thinking of Bill Murray.

Grief Camp, more than most plays running nowadays, takes some creative risks in its storytelling and character development, and those risks pay off. Smith, making her off-Broadway debut, is a welcome presence on the New York theatrical scene, someone who has an uncanny ability to document the human experience and how conversations evolve and devolve based on what’s said and what’s left unsaid. This is one of the strongest shows of the off-Broadway season.