Every Place You Go Can Burn Down
Madeleine George on Grief Hotel 

When you sit down in the theater before Grief Hotel begins, you can’t guess that you’re about to enter a sacred space. 

It comes upon you sneakily–the play doesn’t flaunt its wisdom.  At first you’re just loving the specificity of the characters, the lathe-turned millennial shit-talk of Winn and Em, Aunt Bobbi’s oddball corporatese.  But from the moment the lights come up, the play is working towards something big, juxtaposing Aunt Bobbi’s proposal for a Grief Hotel, a refuge where bereft people can step out of their lives to heal, with the onset of Winn and Asher’s secret affair.  That loss and lies belong in the same play, and are subject to the same inquiries, is one of the play’s subtlest insights.

Throughout Grief Hotel, crimes and losses are offered not as opposites–one done by us, the other done to us–but as points on a continuum, different kinds of calamities that mess us up in similar ways and demand meaningfully similar responses from us.

The parable that begins the play (in the form of a Creative Consumer feedback-survey response–and where else are we supposed to look for prophetic witness these days?) is about a woman who doesn’t just lose her baby but drops her, giving rise to an excruciating cocktail of guilt, grief, and horror.  Aunt Bobbi’s list of example tragedies that could make you eligible to check in to the Grief Hotel includes “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 man slaughter, et cet-ra.”  And the central disaster of the play, Asher’s death by car wreck, is either a suicide or an accident, but either way it’s embedded in Winn’s lies about their affair–bereavement and betrayal tangled up together. 

The young people in the play, new to the game of life, can’t get their bearings amidst all these agonies, and the whole play feels rinsed with bewilderment, as if the subtext of nearly every line is, “Seriously, what is happening right now?”  And it’s not just the kids who aren’t all right.  The weird and wonderful Aunt Bobbi, who has hosted parties where happy high-schoolers blundered into early deaths, survived condo fires, white-knuckled it through earthquakes, and still manages to make it to book club, seems like the Midwestern Buddha figure we all yearn for.  She suffers no fools and, eminently practical, continues to live in the lake house where Winn and Em’s Ur-tragedy occurred, observing with a shrug, “Every place you go can burn down.”  But it’s Aunt Bobbi’s fantasy of a bespoke, luxury destination where you can be stripped of responsibility that frames the play.  She wants as badly as any of the thirtysomething “kids” to go somewhere where she can finally be told, “It’s not your fault.”  

The Jewish notion of teshuvah, usually translated as “repentance,” literally means “to turn.”  To “make teshuvah” can mean to apologize or atone, but it also means to turn to face something, to take responsibility for it.  The Jewish calendar is structured around the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when the act of teshuvah takes center stage and observant Jews are held to account for their actions before each other and God.  Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in his classic work On Teshuvah, speaks of teshuvah as “creative repentance,” a generative act in which a human being, by courageously turning to face what they’ve done, becomes more themselves.  

The sweet souls of Grief Hotel seem poised at this threshold, as desperate to face what they’ve done–and keep doing–to each other as they are to metabolize what they’ve lost.  In a way, apologizing for a mistake is easier than accepting a loss–to apologize for a mistake is to own your power, to dwell in the realm of things we can control and have an impact on.  Losses, which befall and often blindside us, might seem to require a different kind of turning-to-face.  But Grief Hotel shows us how close these two things are.  They reflect the two halves of the grown human being, the one who makes reality and the one who submits to it.  Both halves must be inhabited, with courage.  

Taking responsibility is gnarly business, and for most of the play, our heroes can’t manage it.  And who can blame them?  Tragedies come and keep on coming, rumbling like earthquakes and stinging like wasps.  If you think you can move upstairs to your twenty-seven-year-old landlord’s apartment to escape them, think again.  No family, no love, no sanctuary, no late-stage techno-capitalist society, is safe from the wages of loss and harm.  Every place you go can burn down.

But one thing helps: connection with others.  Yom Kippur embodies this, in the form of collective ritual atonement.  The confessions are offered in a group, the prayers spoken aloud in the first-person plural.  Aunt Bobbi says that all suffering is “pretty much loneliness, because how can you ever communicate your deepest pains?”  So she dreams up a place where you can at least be pampered in your isolation.  But the play wants more for us.  It has gathered us here in congregation, and moves stealthily but steadily towards a group incantation where we speak our gratitude aloud together and the lost young people burst into a chorus of “nostalgic karaoke.”  When Aunt Bobbi turns to welcome us after this, she seems to be seeing not just an unseen interlocutor, not just an “audience,” but us.

Theater’s best gift–its reason for being, arguably–is to give us a space to tolerate life’s limits in community.  Grief Hotel does this sublimely, driving towards this moment of collective turning-towards, and allowing us all to become a little more ourselves.

I mean, what more do you want from a play?  Confetti canons?  Grief Hotel has no confetti canons.  But to be honest, a tiny one went off in my heart the moment the lights went down.

And then we leapt to our feet.