Grief Is A Funny Thing. No, Really.
Three playwrights discuss finding unexpected laughs in the despair
We all deal with grief in our own way.
You could, for instance, imagine yourself as a stand-up comedian doing a tight-15 on existential despair — as in Mike Lemme’s new solo work Before The Drugs Kick In.
Or maybe you would seek the companionship of a kindly robot, even if she herself is dying (and also, pregnant) — as in Micharne Cloughley’s 43 Stages of Grieving.
Or, in a truly grave situation, your loved ones might chip in to get you a room at a boutique hotel that caters, specifically, to the grief-stricken.
Liza Birkenmeier’s Grief Hotel opens with Aunt Bobbie (Susan Blommaert) pitching just such an unconventional establishment.
“Loss is fast, and grief is slow,” she declares. You might be staying a while. So why not rent a room?
Right now, three darkly witty, deeply strange plays arriving off and off-off Broadway tackle grief from disarmingly funny new angles. While their styles differ, these works share a biting and unsentimental approach to themes of loss, despair, and grieving people reaching out for help.
The playwrights say that they only know how to address dark themes through comedy.
“Even if I’m trying to write about something that I feel is important, I don’t really know how to talk about it unless I’m making jokes,” said Birkenmeier in an interview. “I would do it with more somber sincerity if I knew how.”
“Anything that’s going on in your life, you can find a way to talk about it on stage,” echoed Lemme. “All you have to do is add a punchline.”
Lemme’s Before The Drugs Kick In, which runs at Theaterlab March 15 - 30, opens with Lynn (Maria DeCotis) delivering a typical stand-up set, mic in hand. But Lemme peppers in details to indicate that all is not as it seems. We gradually realize that Lynn is a patient at a mental institution, and that imaginary stand-up (with us her imaginary audience) is the way her mind escapes a brutal reality.
“When life gets too hard to handle, some people meditate, or do yoga,” Lynn eventually explains. “I taught myself to close my eyes and become a stand-up comedian – because I heard they’re all mentally ill.”
Cloughley’s 43 Stages of Grieving, now at The Tank through March 25, is set in the year 2333. Anne (Tara Pacheco) is over 300 years old, but has remained youthful through life extension drugs. But after her boyfriend of over a hundred years breaks up with her, Anne decides she is ready to die. That same night, Taya (Clara Francesca), a robot built to help humans, appears in her apartment to lend support.
Taya knows that the process will be painful. After all, she says, “anyone who has grieved” knows that this idea of grief having five stages is just ridiculous.
“Forty-three,” she insists. “There are always forty-three stages.”
She guides Anne through all of them. Some highlights include: “Joking,” “Ice Cream,” “The Song That Says Everything,” “Hard Cheese,” “Grief Has A Solution and I Will Find It,” “Soft Cheese,” and “Just Sad.”
After initial resistance, Anne finds that she needs Taya’s comfort. And Lynn needs her audience.
“There are so many things that happen to people, all the time, that you can’t recover from alone,” said Birkenmeier.
So perhaps, in a world that packages and corporatizes every other idea about feeling good, Aunt Bobbie’s idea isn’t so crazy.
After all, the young, adrift denizens of Grief Hotel, which Clubbed Thumb is re-mounting at The Public Theater March 20 - April 20 following a successful run at last year’s Summerworks, are not finding much success through other means. Winn (Ana Nogueira) is chatting aimlessly with Asher (Bruce McKenzie) on a dating app, while drifting from her partner Theresa (Susannah Perkins), who offers cold comfort to Winn’s concerns about a mutual high school friend that went missing.
“I guess he’s dead,” Theresa says coldly. “I mean where can a person go?”
Meanwhile, Winn’s college ex-girlfriend Em (Nadine Malouf) has formed an intense attachment to an AI chatbot named Melba. Both she and Winn disappear into their devices, seeking to treat despair with more temporary pleasures that, ultimately, will lead to more misery.
Cloughley takes a happier view of AI companionship. Taya is bright and peppy, a robot successfully built simply to be kind.
The two are later joined by Mary (voiced by Alysia Reiner), an electronic prototype of the “perfect woman.” She’s a more imperfect creation, programmed primarily to just say “Yes” to everything. Much of the play’s comedy comes from her over-eagerness to please, like arranging a drone delivery of the perfect outfit for Anne’s final day on Earth.
“I can help you find something new,” Mary announces brightly. “Whatever you want to die in!”
A similar deadpan humor fills Drugs. Lynn is 62 but, as portrayed by Decotis, appears at the age of 28 – the age she entered the institution after attempting suicide in front of her young children.
“If I wanted to die, I’d be dead,” she informs us dryly. “Trust me, I’m a mom – I’m pretty good with a knife.”
The play began a joke from Lemme’s own stand-up. He’s been performing since the age of 14, laying out his personal life to strangers. The joke, inspired by a loved one, riffed on housewives in oppressive suburbs putting up a “Help Wanted” sign in their window to indicate their isolation.
“I don’t think I was ever doing the idea justice through stand-up,” said Lemme. By devising the character of Lynn and the stand-up framing, he found a more empathetic approach that still retained the humor.
For Cloughley, putting her story at a 300-year remove helped the comedy come easier.
“A lot is being written about grief right now, which is not surprising,” she said. “We have so much to deal with.”
If she’d set it today, Cloughley feels, “no-one would want to see a comedy called 43 Stages of Grieving.” But throw in life-extension technology and a pregnant robot, and maybe it becomes a little easier to laugh.
Larger societal concerns do linger on the edges in each story. Lynn was broken by the social isolation of young motherhood, then compounded by stigma around mental illness. And Hotel and 43 Stages both allude to escalating climate catastrophes, unseen but lingering just offstage.
But ultimately, the grievers find some kind of gratitude, if not exactly hope. Gratitude for a 300 year life well-lived, or beautiful children they might one day see again, or sharing a room with people going through the same kind of pain.
It’s a long stay. And eventually, we all have to check out.