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.
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.
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Atlantic Theater Company World Premiere Off-Broadway |
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