Birkenmeier, Liza

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    ‘Grief Hotel,’ an Absurdist Play With a Touch of Anemia

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    Liza Birkenmeier’s abstract play is a unique exploration of romantic relationships but suffers from sleepy direction and a lack of character enrichment.Absurdist theater is like the naturalistic play’s overachieving older sibling. Traditional theater attempts to describe the chaos of the human condition, but absurdist works dare to enact it. Liza Birkenmeier’s “Grief Hotel” is one of those enactors, a strange, snack-sized play that closes out Clubbed Thumb’s 2023 Summerworks series — a proud incubator for strange plays.Birkenmeier’s deft writing (in previous works like “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) and her affinity for morbid humor return here, and despite its title, “Grief Hotel” doesn’t simply dwell on the grim; it’s actually a dark comedy. And while all of the amusing oddness successfully depicts the madness of grief and the complexities of millennial relationships, it does so to the detriment of the play’s message and the production’s intrigue.Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) is the straight-shooting mastermind behind the grief hotel idea — a bespoke getaway for people who have experienced a tragedy: an illness, a breakup, a manslaughter charge. She’s trying to present her concept to the audience, but Birkenmeier interrupts Bobbi’s marketing pitch with a series of conversations among younger characters who are grappling with their own sense of loss: Em (Nadine Malouf), Winn (Ana Nogueira), Rohit (Naren Weiss), Teresa (Susannah Perkins) and Asher (Bruce McKenzie).Although some characters are dealing with death head-on, “Grief Hotel” lingers more on the impermanence of relationships than it does the impermanence of life. Just try to keep track of this: Em and Winn were college girlfriends. But now Em is in a relationship with an unexciting man named Rohit. Rohit is slightly attracted to Teresa. But Teresa, who is nonbinary, is already in a romantic partnership with Winn. Winn craves a novel experience and strikes up a sexual fling with Asher, a straight, married man. Em reserves most of her lust for an A.I. chatbot named Melba. In Em’s mind, the bot looks exactly like Winn.On the surface, this salacious cross-pollination might sound entertaining, but without enough exploration of these people or enough time to invest in the mess of their affairs, “Grief Hotel” feels more like a vague social experiment about impulse and desire than a provocative, character-driven piece of theater.Vagueness seems to be its intention. The scenic design collective called dots cloaks the set with the drab, midcentury décor of a three-star motel. And Tara Ahmadinejad’s languid direction fails to pump the production with much-needed blood. The overall lack of unifying energy surely parallels our fractured, new age of digital dating (a good chunk of Birkenmeier’s script is composed of text messages read aloud), but I found it exhausting IRL.At times, I wondered if the hotel was a purgatory for all of these partnerships — the anxiety-inducing, interstitial space where relationships go to die or thrive. We never land on this, or any, conclusion, but toward the play’s end, Bobbi offers a remedy to the group’s literal and metaphorical mourning: gratitude. Gratitude for the memories shared with past loves and the ones yet to be made with future ones. This — more than time, more than medication — begins to heal all wounds. And regardless of the production’s faults, I was grateful for the reminder.Grief Hotel Through July 1 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More

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      Review: Retracing the Path From Middle School Nerd to Rock Goddess

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      Best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” the enchanting singer-songwriter Jill Sobule is the star of a winsome and defiant autobiographical musical.It is an established fact of human development that most of the people who grew up to be cool and original were nerds for a while, way back when.Case in point: the enchanting Jill Sobule, best known for her 1995 hit song “I Kissed a Girl,” and currently starring in the winsome and defiant autobiographical musical “F*ck7thGrade.” Seventh grade being, as she tells it, the year when it all fell apart — when she no longer fit in with the other girls at her school in Colorado, and they weren’t shy about telling her so.“They thought I was weird because I had a Batman utility belt and a camera that turned into a 007 gun,” she says, and your heart kind of breaks even as you smile, because she must have been darling, right? Then, with an air of baffled wonder: “I was the only one who wanted to be a spy.”She also dreamed of being a rock star, and longed for the girl she had a secret crush on to reciprocate. But it was the early 1970s, and Sobule didn’t fit the template of sugar and spice and everything nice. The girls who had been her friends rejected her. One of them lobbed a homophobic slur her way.“She didn’t even know what that meant,” says Sobule, who is now 61. “But I did.”Directed by Lisa Peterson, the show — at the Wild Project in the East Village — is described in promotional materials as a “rock concert musical,” a slightly awkward term that is nonetheless exactly right. With a book by Liza Birkenmeier, it truly is a musical, backing Sobule with a three-piece band whose musicians — Nini Camps, Kristen Ellis-Henderson and Julie Wolf (also the music director) — play assorted characters throughout the 90-minute show.Still, the performance on this small stage does feel like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley. The name of Sobule’s three-piece band is Secrets of the Vatican — made up of all girls when it existed only in her childhood imagination, and of all women now, which even in 2022 is rare enough to make a statement.On a set by Rachel Hauck whose principal feature is a wall of lockers, Sobule speaks and sings a slender story of her life, starting with the exultant freedom of pre-adolescence and her rocking ode to the bike she cherished then, “Raleigh Blue Chopper.”“When I was 12, I was a fierce little rocker who wanted to be Jimi Hendrix,” she says with the same sly, sunny, quietly confiding air that the video for “I Kissed a Girl” captured 27 years ago. “I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was,” she adds. “I just was.”The performance on this small East Village stage feels like a concert, complete with rock-show lighting by Oona Curley.Eric McNattBut the wider world of the late 20th century was not much more hospitable to ambitious female musicians — let alone lesbians — than seventh grade had been. Sobule remembers a conversation she overheard at her record label in the ’90s, about Tracy Chapman and Melissa Etheridge and how glad the label was that Sobule was straight. Which she wasn’t, as they might have guessed from “I Kissed a Girl,” but she also wasn’t about to clue them in.“I wish I would have said to all of them: it’s a big ol’ gay gay song,” she says. “But I didn’t. I was too scared. I wanted to do the smart thing. I wanted to be arty and transgressive, but I wanted to sell records. The compromising got me nowhere. And then I couldn’t stand my own song.”Shorter, sharper and more theatrical than Etheridge’s current Off Broadway show, “My Window,” Sobule’s is much more intimate in scale — although each pays brief tribute to “Day by Day,” from “Godspell,” with which both musicians’ teen years coincided.“Strawberry Gloss,” “Forbidden Thoughts of Youth,” “Sold My Soul” and “Underdog Victorious” are among the songs Sobule sings from her own catalog. Eventually, so is “I Kissed a Girl.”This is a show for Sobule fans, and for a queer audience, but it’s also for the many nerds who grew up to be the cool people. It will give you flashbacks to middle school, no matter how popular you were; that’s pretty much guaranteed. But it will also give you the cheering company of Sobule and her extremely non-imaginary, rocking-out band.F*ck7thGradeThrough Nov. 8 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; thewildproject.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Islander,’ the Puck Stops Here

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      This verbatim hockey drama considers issues of masculinity and the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players.The 2017 season didn’t start too badly. The New York Islanders, a National Hockey League team with a new coach and a newish berth at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, might have allowed a few too many shots on goal, but they still won most of their games. A couple of months later, in December, it all began to go wrong. Then it went more wrong. The defense fell apart. The team missed the playoffs. John Tavares, the Islanders’ captain and star player, departed for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Fans revolted.The director Katie Brook and the playwright Liza Birkenmeier, hockey fans both, have scraped some of that bad ice into “Islander,” a verbatim piece at HERE. Presented by Tele-Violet and supported by New Georges, the play borrows commentary from the season and puts it in the mouth of a bearded, sweatpants-clad, aggressively average dude called Man (David Gould). (The sources aren’t listed, but Man’s language suggests live broadcast commentary, postgame interviews and fan forums.)Additional text is culled from the celebrity academic and men’s rights stan Jordan Peterson. Imagine a snow cone that’s part obsession, part self-justification, part masculine fragility, sweetened with self-pity and sweat, and you’re mostly there.Brook and Birkenmeier (“Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”) are interested in questions of identity, identification and form. They have structured “Islander” a little like a game. It begins with the national anthem and pauses for a halftime dance break. A bare stage, carpeted in rubber tiles, stands in for the rink. (The set and lighting design are by Josh Smith.) But there’s just one player — and then toward the end, a second (Dick Toth) and a third (Aksel Latham-Mitchell, a child actor who also provides a drum solo). If you’re looking for the nail-biting narrative propulsion of a proper game, look elsewhere. A buzzer beater, “Islander” is not.It does, though, probe some fascinating ideas, like the peculiar ownership that fans feel toward a team and its players — a level of mimetic engagement that theater rarely achieves, Broadway musicals excepted. No man is an island, but a lot of men, recliner-bound and alone with their Wi-Fi, seem to consider themselves Islanders. And fan forums and postgame debriefs provide the rare spaces in American life where men are actively encouraged to talk about their feelings. In these homosocial arenas, they confess their self-doubt, their disappointment and their feelings of low self-worth.Gould, air guitaring away self-doubt and disappointment in “Islanders.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m very arrogant,” Man says. “I’m very lost within myself. I’m as sick of me as you are.” (Less helpfully, these are also spaces for some men to justify their mediocrity.) But the script — a latticework of unconnected observations — has a way of flattening out these ideas, compressing them like the air mattress that Latham-Mitchell’s John Tavares cheerfully deflates.“Islander” isn’t long, just 75 minutes, about the same as a hockey game. But since it offers so little in the way of plot or character, it feels longer. The language of commentary isn’t particularly interesting, though there are blazes of figuration (“He makes them as uncomfortable as a beached whale”), a few snappy neologisms (“Sneakery: Is that a word?”) and the occasional metaphor melee.While Gould is a charmer — precise, inexhaustible, brave enough to dance with his shirt off — there is only so much an actor can do when stringing together disjointed fan forum posts and meditations that only an extremely concussed Marcus Aurelius might write: “Good is the enemy of great. No more good; it’s time to be great.”Maybe “Islander,” like many N.H.L. games, is better experienced via a highlights reel.IslanderThrough Sept. 4 at HERE, Manhattan; 212-647-0202, Here.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Dudes on Ice: A Play About Hockey Tackles Masculinity, Too

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      “Islander,” a skewed look at a New York Islanders season, examines extreme fandom, violence and the thrill of sports.Hockey is a brutal game: In what other sport are missing teeth a badge of honor? Not that Liza Birkenmeier and Katie Brook were in any danger of losing Chiclets as they stared down a puck: Not only were they playing air hockey instead of the ice-rink version, but they also seemed to prefer huddling on the same side of the table rather than face each other.Clearly Birkenmeier, a playwright, and Brook, a director, like being on the same team. They started working together almost 10 years ago and their fruitful collaboration includes the well-received “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” and the new “Islander,” a skewed look at the New York Islanders’ fateful 2017-18 season, when the team failed to make the playoffs and its star, John Tavares, was about to become a free agent. (The show was originally slated for March 2020 and opened Saturday at HERE Arts Center.)There have been quite a few sports-themed plays by women in recent years, most notably Sarah DeLappe’s soccer-centric hit “The Wolves” and Lydia R. Diamond’s portrait of a barrier-shattering baseball player, “Toni Stone,” but they have focused on the female athletic experience.“Islander,” on the other hand, zeros in on “dudes doing dude stuff,” as Birkenmeier put it. An extreme version of dude stuff: Professional hockey is “unhinged and violent and white,” she said. In other words, it provides a fine lens through which to look at modern masculinity and its discontents.John Tavares playing for the New York Islanders in 2017. He was the team’s star and was about to become a free agent.Nick Wass/Associated PressTo do so, Birkenmeier, 35, and Brook, 39, pulled lines from game commentary and analysis, and podcasts like “Islanders Anxiety.” Then those sources were edited into a quasi-monologue for a composite character referred to simply as Man (David Gould) — so “Islander” is also a sly reflection on solo shows by the likes of Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray.There is a certain affection, too, as Birkenmeier and Brook enjoy watching hockey, not just using it as a decoder ring for male behavior. A few days before previews started, the two women turned up at a Brooklyn games emporium for a chat about pucks and violence. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The show’s narrator is obsessive, whiny, triumphant, analytical, bellicose, despondent — all the stages of fandom. What impression are you trying to create?LIZA BIRKENMEIER We’re highlighting the ridiculousness of his struggle as opposed to empathizing with it.KATIE BROOK We’re leaning into the haplessness of it: It’s not a hero’s journey, although he thinks it is. The dance we do is to engage the audience enough that you think you’re going along with him and then you kind of back off.Do you think professional sports foster a kind of stereotypical masculinity, or do they help channel it so the rest of us are a little bit safer?BROOK [Laughs] It’s a good outlet but it also reinforces things that I think are bad. Amateur sports are actually wonderful and must be kept separate in some ways, but professional sports, in part just because of the basics of capitalism, have to be violent and extreme. Basketball is not that way.BIRKENMEIER Or baseball. Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy. It’s part of the sensationalism. I do think it’s very poisonous. The ideas of legacy and dignity and loyalty come up so violently.According to Birkenmeier, right, “Hockey really points to a sort of dignity culture: If somebody gets in your goalie’s way, it’s part of the game to go up and punch that guy.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesWhy do you think theater hasn’t really tackled hard-core fandoms, either in sports or pop culture, considering the huge part they play in modern life?BROOK I don’t think there’s a lot of satire in theater these days. That may be part of it. Also a well-made play is based on things that we should all be able to relate to, like real estate. A lot of them hinge on the loss of the family home or whatever — some big events that everyone can agree is a big deal. But people can’t really relate to most obsessions. Those people are all on the same page about how important it is — it’s for them, not for us.BIRKENMEIER Sometimes we underestimate that sports is better theater: It’s so much like a play except you literally don’t know what’s going to happen and somebody has to win. A hockey game as a community event is potentially more exciting than a play.BROOK Well, most people think that.What was it like researching the show?BIRKENMEIER Watching the games at bars, I would sit and take notes and men would quiz me. They wouldn’t believe that I was into it. They would ask, “Who’s your favorite player?”BROOK That’s a softball question.BIRKENMEIER It is, and often they’d be like, “Is your favorite player John Tavares?” Or ask me what I thought of the last game. Or ask me what I thought of the new or old management, or whose contract was going to be up.BROOK Insulting flirting: They want to show that they’re smarter than you, but it’s supposed to be a flirtation.BIRKENMEIER Oh my God, I never took it as flirtation! I would have been more flattered. One guy was really excited about the play.Did you go to many games as well?BROOK We went to a bunch of games in Brooklyn and no one was there. After John Tavares left the [Islanders] and joined the [Toronto] Maple Leafs, I went to Nassau Coliseum at the first game against the Leafs and it was horrific. The fans were so angry, they kept yelling “We don’t need you!” every time John came on the ice. It was scary, actually. It’s not a show about violence but there is a sort of underlying fear that this guy [the narrator] is threatening, somehow.BIRKENMEIER I generally think it’s important to be funny. It’s very easy to take this and to take a serious skewering look at it.BROOK No one needs to suffer right now.BIRKENMEIER Let’s have fun, you know? More

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      Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

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      Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More