The campers in Eliya Smith’s new play are not the happy kind. The show is called “Grief Camp,” after all — though Smith delays even mentioning what ails her characters. And when she finally gets to it, she parcels out information in fragmentary exchanges and scenes.
This strategy does help the show steer clear of therapeutic bromides and conventional catharsis, but it creates a different problem: “Grief Play,” which leans heavily on whimsy, feels unmoored, tentative.
Les Waters’s staging of this play — Smith’s Off Broadway debut — for Atlantic Theater Company is marvelously realized, as much, at least, as Smith’s often maddening script allows. The set designer Louisa Thompson has recreated a cabin that feels so lived in, you can almost smell the wet towels and hear the soft creak of the bunk beds. The six teenagers who inhabit it can be tender or they can be aggressive. Sometimes they shut down and sometimes they open up. Always, communication proves slippery.
Every morning, the kids are summoned to breakfast by P.A. announcements from the unseen Rocky (Danny Wolohan) that grow increasingly lengthy and surreal as the show progresses. Sometimes, a guitar player (Alden Harris-McCoy) comes in and strums a guitar by the side of the cabin. Is he a counselor? Do those teenagers really want to hear the country song “Goin’ Away Party”?
Smith paints the campers in quick brush strokes as they go through their daily activities. The girls have a little more individuality than the boys — the underwritten Bard (Arjun Athalye) and Gideon (Dominic Gross) almost feel like payback for decades, if not centuries of malnourished female roles — but little adds up. The characters harbor emotions yet come across as numb, they have quirks yet are undifferentiated. You could consider this elusiveness as a commentary on grief itself, but it’s a challenge to bring an audience along.
The most elaborate interactions take place between two characters whose shared scenes pique our attention: the counselor Cade (Jack DiFalco) and the camper Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell), whose prickly relationship gives this nebulous show a source of narrative tension. He is not much older than his charges and like them he carries an emotional burden. But somehow he appears to incite tumultuous reactions in Olivia, who already has a tendency to hide her distress under a tough attitude and provocative statements — “Damn need to change my tampon,” she tells Cade, seemingly apropos of nothing. (Referencing Chekhov, the script describes Olivia as “a Yelena who thinks she’s a Sonya,” but she feels more like a Cady pretending she’s a Regina.)
The other girls include Olivia’s sister, Esther (Lark White); Luna (Grace Brennan); and Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), who emerges as another strong personality only because of a childlike yet determined innocence.
Blue is writing a musical that, based on what we discover about it, has the makings of Shaggs-like outsider art. She asks the other campers for feedback (“I’d prefer if you kept it sort of granular”), but she is too lost in her peculiar, solipsistic inner world to appear to take it into account. (Her monologue toward the end is not so much a character speaking as a playwright listening to the sound of her own voice.)
Waters (“Dana H.,” “The Thin Place”) has an affinity for creating slightly eerie, disquieting atmospheres, and he respects the play’s ellipses and its commitment to nonlinear weirdness. This only makes the occasional overcompensation a noticeable misstep. The sound designer Bray Poor can create the illusion of rain falling outside the cabin, summoning the almost subliminal impression that we are right there with the campers — so when actual rain eventually comes down onstage, it’s a little jarring.
The show is most interesting in its suggestion that the campers are lost in a kind of limbo in which hours and days lose their traditional meaning. “I just wanted you kids to think about the passage of time and how it feels in the body,” Rocky says toward the end of a particularly verbose P.A. announcement. And here I found myself circling back to oddball Blue and her amorphous musical. What is time for this girl, holding on to childhood but maybe a little curious about whatever awaits, vast and uncertain?
Grief Camp
Through May 11 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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