Review: Grief Camp Imagines Summer Camp for Teens in Mourning

Weight loss, lacrosse, theater…there are a lot of specialized summer camps, so why not one for teens who have recently been touched by death? Apparently, such places exist, providing the inspiration for Eliya Smith’s Grief Camp, now making its delayed world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company following a months-long labor dispute that shuttered the theater.

Louisa Thompson’s bunk room set perfectly conveys an atmosphere of no-frills recreation, a sad string of multicolored pennants tacked to the untreated wooden walls, as if stolen from the grand opening of a 7-Eleven. They seem to say, Yes, this is a place for processing grief…but it’s also fun!

Blue (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) doesn’t seem to be having a good time, though. Seated on the floor next to her bed and buried under her own voluminous hair, she’s lost and alone—even though she’s sharing a bedroom (and one highly coveted bathroom) with six other people.

It’s a coed living situation. The boys, Gideon (Dominic Gross) and Bard (Arjun Athalye), occupy bunk right with twentysomething counselor Cade (Jack DiFalco). Bunk left is for the girls: Blue, Luna (Grace Brennan), and sisters Esther (Lark White) and Olivia (Renée-Nicole Powell). Each morning, they wake to the sound of a particularly bad rendition of Reveille played over the PA system by camp director Rocky (Danny Wolohan), who then reads announcements as the kids scramble to start their day, filling every hour with outdoor activities and counseling sessions.

Our view is mostly limited to the cabin, so we only see glimpses of their day and we never get a full picture of the tragedies that brought them here. Fragments of the past arrive in fleeting, unguarded phrases. Tune out for a moment and you’ll miss them. Smith has written no weepy confessional monologues or traumatic flashback scenes. She seems mostly interested in the mundane task of getting through another day, which is to say the real work of grieving.

But there’s a line between realism and dullness, and Grief Camp straddles that border. I frequently found myself wondering, where is this going? And I was unsurprised to read that Smith endeavored to make her characters less articulate than the real-life grieving campers she discovered on TikTok, as this might come across as “bad writing.” Viewers may not be surprised to learn that Smith, currently in the MFA program at UT Austin, studies under Annie Baker, the reigning queen of the subtly surreal.

Luckily, Grief Camp has one of the best directors for this kind of play. Les Waters charges the air with anticipation, forcing us to learn forward and pay attention. Thompson’s set is full of unexpected surprises, artfully executed by special effects designer Jeremy Chernick. Inclement weather brings the campers inside (lighting designer Isabella Byrd and sound designer Bray Poor leave little doubt about the weather outside, at one point conjuring a monsoon). Oana Botez costumes the actors in athletic shorts and ill-fitting t-shirts, telling the story of young adults who haven’t fully figured out how to style themselves and really cannot be bothered considering what they’re going through.

The excellent ensemble easily inhabits this fully realized environment. Powell especially commits to the dangerous performance Olivia is giving as she deploys her 17-year-old sexuality as a means of controlling at least one thing in her life. We never can tell how much this rattles Cade, the frequent subject of her overtures. DiFalco smartly plays his cards close to his chest.

Laanstra-Corn gives the most memorable performance as Blue, living up to her name as a human ball of sadness, pouring her grief into her highly imaginative stories (she is a writer). Her delivery of a late monologue, which imagines as slightly older Blue having traveled some distance from her initial grief, is the most memorable part of the entire show, and Laanstra-Corn delivers it beautifully.

Theatergoers who prefer straightforward dramas with easily identifiable peaks and valleys are likely to be frustrated by Grief Camp, a play that meanders, digresses, and patently refuses to indulge the audience’s desire for tragedy porn. But in its quiet, circuitous way, Grief Camp mirrors the truth of grieving, which really cannot be charted in a tidy process of seven steps, nor does it fit neatly into a PTO bereavement allotment. It’s one of the most common human experiences, and it refuses to conform to our contemporary notions of a productive society. There’s no more damning evidence of the American propensity to ignore reality than that.