It’s summer in Hurt, Virginia, where a lone cabin fills each year with campers. There's homecooked breakfast and an army of box fans and lots of shifting in the dark. Welcome to Grief Camp: a study of loss and adolescence.
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.
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.
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Atlantic Theater Company World Premiere Off-Broadway |
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