A note from the playwright – Liza Birkenmeier

I used to work as a “Creative Consumer” for an “innovation agency,” and in a breakout group from an ideation session, I tried to convince the client that they should create a grief retreat at their hotel chain. I thought this was the best idea I’d ever had, if I only included ideas that I genuinely believed would be lucrative for multinational corporations.

This idea, the millionth American idea of capitalizing on the fiction of wellness, felt pleasurably gruesome. I thought I should make a performance piece in which I invited an audience to the concept and tried to make them feel better.

Meanwhile, there’s always a little part of me running around a party at a peanut farm, listening to Hootie and the Blowfish. I’ve always felt the unsettling and soothing ecosystem of Missouri as part of my body: going out to the river, the cave, to—now—my in-laws’ lake house. I started writing a play where people had an eerie homegoing after the most uncomfortable tragedies I could imagine. Maybe the “real” “grief hotel” was all the way back there, after all.

The theoretical pieces became one literal play, and I wanted to write about the ridiculousness of corporatizing a feeling of ease. I accidentally wrote about—I think—the ridiculousness of desire. The piece didn’t contain the snarky excoriation I intended, but instead, both wilder and more brutal—to me, truer—stuff around longing.

Even if we can’t trust time or memory, even if we can’t accept grief or desire as the matters of nature they are, mundane and dangerous as weather, we’re all experts in loss, I think. There’s no need to tell you what tragedies imprinted onto these figures and dynamics, specifically. I trust you have your own. I don’t really believe that an exclusive, luxury experience would save us from the inevitable pains of withstanding an ecosystem. And yet, somehow, I’m desperate for the figurative way we conjure things here to be briefly and literally curative.