Six campers and a counselor search for healing in Grief Camp (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

GRIEF CAMP
Atlantic Theater Company, Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 11, $56.50-$111.50
866-811-4111
atlantictheater.org

There has been a surfeit of plays about grief the last few years, most of them involving children and/or adults sitting around in circles in group or family therapy, sharing their personal stories. In her off-Broadway debut, twenty-seven-year-old Eliya Smith, who is in her final semester in the University of Texas at Austin’s MFA playwriting program, takes a different approach in the fiendishly clever Grief Camp, continuing at the Atlantic through May 11.

Bereavement camps have been popping up all over, offering healing for those who have lost loved ones; they have such names as Camp Good Grief, Comfort Zone Camp, and Camp Hope. Smith sets her tale at an unnamed summer camp in the real town of Hurt, Virginia. (It was named for a local landowner and attorney, not the pain of loss.)

Louisa Thompson’s set is a large, somewhat disheveled cabin with four double bunk beds, two electric box fans on the floor, a bathroom in the back, and a small porch with a swing chair outside. On the natural wood walls are pages torn out of magazines, postcards, and a string of colored pennants.

It is home to six campers and one counselor: Bard (Arjun Athalye), who is addicted to Duolingo; Luna (Grace Brennan), a Los Angeles vegetarian who wants to be an artist; Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn), who is writing the rather strange musical untitled mansion island purple house project for her high school; Gideon (Dominic Gross), a cool dude who can’t swim and is worried about his missing green dinosaur; Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell), who doesn’t look forward to any of the scheduled activities; her younger sister, Ester (Lark White), who hates grief camp; and Cade (Jack DiFalco), a former camper who is now a counselor, living and working with the others in the cabin.

Grief Camp continues at the Atlantic through May 11 (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Each morning, everyone is woken up by the camp’s founder, the never-seen Rocky, who blows a terrible reveille on the trumpet, makes announcements, gives the weather report, and advises some form of “Rise and shine, kids! Welcome to another perfect day from which to begin the rest of your lives.” It’s not the most encouraging or original bromide.

Over the course of about ten days — the script calls it a “time soup” — the campers bond, argue, battle with the counselors, and avoid getting caught up in woe-is-me self-pity. Esther is afraid she is a terrible person and confides in Luna. Blue holds readings of her ever-morphing musical. Campers are sick of chores, pray to the toenail god, and fight over the bathroom. A guitarist sits in the swing chair and sings Debbie Friedman’s rendition of “Mi Shebeirach,” the Jewish prayer for healing. The campers don’t mope around in mourning or compare one another’s tragedies, although there is a palpable feeling of grief permeating the atmosphere.

In a one-on-one with Olivia, Cade tells her to take out her journal and address the following prompt: “Sometimes, in our grief, we invent guilt in order to feel control over a situation. Sound familiar? Of course it does. So go ahead. Address that guilt head on. Apologize to the person to whom you feel guilt. Explain how you would —”

Olivia cuts him off, wanting to just talk instead. They discuss college, flirting, and Olivia’s different-colored eyes. Olivia asks Cade why he keeps coming back to the camp; he replies, “This place saved my life.” A moment later, Olivia says, “If I had to come back here I suspect I would kill myself.”

Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) discusses the high school musical she’s writing in Eliya Smith’s off-Broadway debut at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)

In another scene, Cade strongly advises, “At some point, Olivia, you’re gonna have to stop acting like you’re broken.” That line serves as the centerpiece of the ninety-minute play. Smith and Tony-nominated director Les Waters (Dana H., Big Love) carefully avoid any lapses into sentimentality or solipsism, treating Cade and the campers like unique characters in their own right and not as plot points to rhapsodize about grief. In fact, we don’t even learn the specific loss that each camper experienced, only some of them. In addition, Blue’s oddball musical slowly twists into focus but without becoming obviously metaphorical.

The ensemble, several of whom are making their off-Broadway debut, engagingly portray complex characters about to move on with their lives but not yet ready to face the world. The realistic costumes are by Oana Botez, with sharp lighting by Isabella Byrd and terrific sound design by Bray Poor, from rainstorms to Rocky’s staticky announcements to Luna singing into a floor fan.

Early on, Luna encourages Bard to curl up in the fetal position. He is tentative at first, but when he eventually tries it, he declares he is the biblical Moses in a basket on a river. “Why can’t you just be like a regular baby,” Luna says. Smith explains in the script, “The children are not precocious wunderkind iconoclasts or tiny prophets. They are not special. Something extraordinarily bad happened to each of them. They are ordinary.”

In other words, just like the rest of us.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]