Grief Hotel (a theory of relativity)
by Sarah Lunnie

There was a moment in Tara Ahmadinejad’s production of Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel at Clubbed Thumb last summer that stopped my heart. In the middle of a scene I can only describe as genuinely sexy — this is rare, onstage, I think — Bruce McKenzie’s aging country-music star Asher Lowden, engaging in a touchless but improbably erotic exchange with Ana Nogueira’s Winn, suddenly made a shape with his body I’ve never seen onstage before. Then he disappeared backwards up the aisle of the theater. It was like watching a piece of cereal get sucked up by a vacuum cleaner.

I won’t say more about it, because a magic trick is so much better than a summary of one, and if you’re reading this not yet having seen it, why deprive you of your own discovery? I don’t mean “magic trick” in the literal sense, I mean this moment was a quiet marvel in a play full of them. Liza and Tara and this company have distilled, with great lightness, something so solid and so true about the experience of being alive on the planet — the repetition of loss — that I’m still carrying it around with me all these months later like a small polished stone. 

It’s a comedy, sort of, in case I’m giving you the wrong impression! — you’ll laugh a lot, or I did  —  but you’ll have to trust me on that, because I’m just going to keep talking about death now. A woman you’ll meet called Aunt Bobbi has conceptualized the titular hotel and will spend the play pitching it to you: “You can go there if your sibling gets deathly sick, or if you find out that the person you love doesn’t love you back, or if you commit manslaughter, et cet-ra.” She’s got a throwaway line about  “life-changing consequences for ordinary behaviors,” and damn if that wasn’t a throwing star right to my chest. What Bobbi understands, and what the play evokes so disarmingly, has something to do with the relationship between grief and agency, stolen or forsaken or misapplied or, most often, simply irrelevant. Sure, we all make mistakes, but sometimes you go to sleep and wake up again and the ground beneath your feet has rearranged itself. You’ve lost something essential, for no reason, and you can’t ever get it back. Agency, and time. Here’s another one from Bobbi, blazingly precise: “Even if you have some long story, loss is fast, and grief is slow.” Who among us hasn’t wished for “a more controlled experience of time”?

I was going to say something about karaoke to lighten the mood, but now I’m doing it again, depriving you of the pure pleasure I experienced watching these characters wrap their arms around each other and scream into the night. Spoiler alert: transcendence in surrender, in abandon. Just come, that’s all I really want to say, get thee to the Shiva. The universe of Grief Hotel is one you might recognize. Time is passing, you are aging, your new shower curtain is somehow already moldering, the food your partner (/be honest, you) left in the fridge is growing feet. People, including your partner (/be honest, you), behave badly and the physics of everything is unforgiving. Nothing you do matters at all, then you shut the door and someone dies. But you are here now, you’re alive, the sun rose this morning, you live in a world in which dogs also exist. You might yet be forgiven, though surely you don’t deserve it. You are not alone.

—Sarah Lunnie