Sitting down to work this afternoon, I selected to play my “On Repeat” playlist on Spotify: a selection of songs, continuously played, curated both by and for me. As I started this paragraph, Doris Day’s Ohio started to blare from my computer, fittingly so because it was that song that was included in the first piece of Eliya Smith’s work I ever saw: The Goat Exchange’s Dead Class, Ohio at The Tank this past March. I had not realized, sitting in the audience of Dead Class, that this play shared a writer with Grief Camp, one of two plays put on at The Atlantic Theater for their spring season and also in her last year of her MFA at The University of Texas at Austin. In Dead Class, I was struck by the subtlety of the writing. Considering the piece’s heavy subject matter, Smith never overexplained but allowed ideas to exist in space creating a play open and ripe for audience perception. Once I made the connection, I raced to see Grief Camp. I had to see this playwright at work in another context and see what her approach would look like on a different stage. I had to see another of her plays! Dead Class marked my introduction to Eliya Smith not only for her work, but her place in New York City theatre. Seeing Grief Camp not only provided an opportunity to see Smith’s theatrical approach, but see the next step in her blossoming career. Seated at The Atlantic Theater in April, I was met with another subtle play. Another work wrought with meaning that created room of ambiguity and uncertainty. I spoke to Eliya Smith in April about the development of Grief Camp, development process of Grief Camp, her collaboration with director Les Waters, and launching her professional career while still a student.
Eve Bromberg: How does it feel to be graduating from an MFA program and have a professional production going at the same time?
Eliya Smith: This year was so intense, though I feel so obscenely lucky. I would say that I have a high tolerance for stress and stressful situations, but I feel like I need to bury myself in sand for about three months and then emerge. Until this show, I had only been doing scrappy theatre projects with my friends, so Grief Camp was a pretty steep learning curve, in many ways. When I got offered the show, which was about a year ago, I didn’t have an agent, and I was living in Austin as a graduate student. It all happened so suddenly. It completely changed my life.
EB: Can you speak to your learning curve in being involved in this production? Do you now have an agent?
ES: I have an agent, a wonderful agent, named Sam Barickman! I think most of it was being in a room with such a legendary director and so many amazing designers. A lot of the people designing my show were people I really idolized. I sort of felt, going in, that it felt ludicrous to be in this room when I didn’t even take myself seriously. A lot of it was figuring out how to be in the room, how to talk to people, to engage with the play, how to advocate for the play, and also leave lots of space for people to bring in their own contributions. But aside from that, I’ve just never had this long of a rehearsal process or a preview process, which was very fun. I got to change the script a lot! But figuring out just the everyday logistics of working on a show that’s going up Off-Broadway… It felt like, despite having experience working on a lot of meaningful smaller projects in New York, going from zero to one hundred, that experience was very heady.
EB: Is there a part of an MFA curriculum where they talk through any of this process?
ES: There’s a third-year play festival that the school sends responders to come see, and two years ago, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins– who had taught at UT and just left– and Annie Baker– who still teaches at UT– came to see the shows, and because I have a car, I volunteered to pick them up. I am not a good driver at all, and yet I was somehow driving two of the greatest living playwrights in America to campus… I told myself if I fucked it up I’d never forgive myself Anyway, at the time, I was working on a show in Austin with undergraduate actors and a graduate director, and I remember feeling that I didn’t know how to be in the room as a playwright. So, I decided to just ask Annie and Brandon to walk me through a day in rehearsal as a playwright. They were both like, we have no idea how to answer that question. I remember that conversation very distinctly because it made me realize that perhaps you never get off that roller coaster of not knowing what you’re doing.
EB: You’re also in such a particular position as the playwright because the mounting of the work is another dimension that ultimately ends up in someone else’s hands. How much, as a writer, do you consider how the play will look when staged?
ES: One thing that helped me immensely with that is that Les is such a good director of new work. He always wanted to hear what I had to say and was very encouraging of my instincts and sharing with the cast. That helped me feel more comfortable about what kinds of contributions I could make. Often, I would be in conversations with Les where I would suggest re-writing something if I felt it wasn’t working, and he’d respond asking if he should try something else out with what was already on the page. That dynamic was something we encountered often in the rehearsal room, and it was exciting.
EB: How did it come to be that you ended up working with Les Waters?
ES: After the show had been programmed, I was looking for an agent and a director at the same time, and I had a meeting with Sam, who’s now my agent, and at one point I was on the phone with Sam, who represents Les, and he asked if I would consider Les. I didn’t think he would agree to doing the production because he’s such a legend, but he was sort of a perfect fit aesthetically because he’s so into stillness and silence, which works very well for the play. Then I met with Les and we really hit it off! We felt like pals from the beginning. It was interesting because Les is so amazing and I knew he would teach me so much, but at the same time, I also thought it could’ve been a total disaster. I had no idea how he was in the rehearsal room, and I’d never had a professional production of my own work before, and the cast was going to be very young. So I wasn’t sure what would happen. He ended up doing exactly what I wanted with the show artistically. But the greatest gift he gave me was how incredibly kind, supportive, and encouraging he was to me and to the actors. The rehearsal room was just the happiest, happiest place. That was totally all him.
EB: I’m guessing with such an august career, Les has been in all sorts of scenarios, but for the cast, this was either their off-Broadway or their Atlantic debut. Was that intentional?
ES: It wasn’t intentional. Pretty much everyone in the cast is in their early 20s, and we agreed it was important to have young people in the roles. That lends itself to a lot of debuts, but a lot of that was truly who was the best for each part. We had Taylor Williams as a casting director who really has her finger on the pulse, and she brought in a huge range of people with a huge range of experiences. We just really felt like we were casting people who fit the show the best, and it happened to be a lot of people who hadn’t done a ton of work before, but there wasn’t any sort of plan to only have actors who weren’t as seasoned.
EB: You requested that we hold off this interview until I saw the show. Could you speak a bit more about Les’ particular contributions and how he helped realize the play? Were there ever moments where he helped you to change your perspective on your own work?
ES: Les talks a lot about how a lot of plays that are put on feel like they’ve been sent to the gym. He felt that because of the circumstances of the play, the audience would be able to place feelings onto the characters. Les really freed me to not feel like I needed to pump things up with the writing.I was always attuned to what he was most excited by, and he is normally most excited by small moments and subtlety. In many ways, I was rewriting the show to fit with the things that he was most excited about directing.
EB: Where did the idea of this play come from? Was there at all a personal element?
ES: I experienced a loss as a pretty young child, and then I found out about these grief camps many years later. I thought I would’ve loved to have something like that, because much of my experience was quite lonely. Any experience of grief at any age is isolating, but being a child, I was going through something that other children didn’t understand and didn’t have a vocabulary for trying to understand. So it was sort of like writing a fantasy play about what it might have been like at one of these places.
EB: How would you describe how each character deals with their grief?
ES: In the beginning, I was writing a bit more in broad strokes. I was more interested in having them talk about grief and talk about their feelings and be emotional about the grief. But when I would read back what I wrote, I wasn’t excited by it. I didn’t want to see it on stage. But it was helpful to have these ideas of what was happening on a grief level for each of the characters. When we rehearsed the show, we spent a lot of time speaking to each actor about their character’s loss and their particular way of dealing with it. To me, what I was most excited by when I was writing was when I just started to feel like I had a sense of who they were as characters, so I could write beyond the explicit grief and focus on the place where the specific person and their grief meet. I wanted there to be a representation of a full color wheel of how people respond to grief. I wanted that to be in the background of the play.
EB: I got a sense watching it that it was clear that the person responsible for this play had known the experience of loss intimately because it was beyond the shock factor and alienation of the experience. It was a representation of the other side: when you’ve lived with the experience of this loss every day.
ES: Thank you for sharing that.
EB: Thank you! Do you think of this play in any particular tradition of contemporary theater?
ES: I was very influenced by Annie [Baker]. I think as a teacher, she is very interested in what is the most interesting or surprising thing that you can do as a writer, which feels silly to say about this play where very little happens on a plot level. But I felt like for me, the obvious thing to do would be to make these characters mourn on stage, so I was sort of following a rule of how can I surprise myself by having my characters do what I’m not expecting them to do in this play.
EB: I’m curious about Olivia’s character and her particular brand of feminism, which feels very contemporary. How do you explain the unprompted nature of her provocations? Is she attempting to test Cade?
ES: What I was interested in writing is someone who has experienced something brutally difficult, who feels an urge to experience disaster that she’s orchestrated herself. I love writing teenage girls, and I’ve always been interested in the strange experience that happens as a teenage gir,l where on the one hand you feel like you have no power, on the other hand, there’s a cultural narrative that your body gives you the most power you’ll ever have. I’m interested in that experience in general, and with Olivia, it became about her starting to comprehend how she moves through the world and enjoying a sense of danger, and also trying to keep this sense of grief and guilt at bay.
EB: Can you speak to the moment in the play where all the characters are downstage and eating? For instance, Esther and Olivia, who are sisters, eat the same thing– pasta with tomato sauce, I think. I’m interested in the significance of the moment and the particularity of the food item each character has.
ES: I can talk about it, but it was important to us that that moment remain partially illegible. There’s so much in the play about the hunger inherent in grief. Craving something that you know you’ll never get or feel filled by. I also love watching people eat on stage. I think of it as an amazingly grounding experience for the viewer. But the moment is meant to be obtuse, where the audience cannot totally understand what the characters are going through.
EB: Does that same legibility extend to the character of the guitarist as well?
ES: Sort of! We wanted it to be ambiguous as to whether or not he’s actually at the camp. Also, I love Chekhov dearly, and I love that he’s always having someone come in and play random songs. I always feel when I read words I’ve written that it’s close to what I’m trying to say, but not entirely right. There’s a monologue in the play about how feckless words are. I liked having another way of inducing feeling that wasn’t language.
EB: I think you’re such an expert in monologues. Maybe this is because I was introduced to your work via The Goat Exchange’s Deadclass, Ohio. But the Rocky monologue, where he talks about Anne Carson and the love of his life, I was so struck by it. I’m interested in the motivation of that monologue and the discussion of the limitations of language. How much is this meant to tap into the unconscious sexuality of the camp, or is that an Olivia-specific phenomenon?
ES: It’s teenagers at summer camp, so I wanted it to feel broadly libidinal. I wanted Rocky to never appear on stage, which creates the sense of him as a God-like figure. The different campers have a slightly different way of thinking about divinity and whether or not there’s any cosmic influence on their lives. I wanted Rocky to be another potential strand of that thought or question. With that specific monologue that you’re referencing, I had a lot of different versions of it. It comes right out of the storm– when the storm happens, it’s this sort of chaotic nightmare playground where there’s no sense of adults or intervention, and no one is going to save them. As far as we understand it, Rocky seems like a good camp leader, and people like him. The next thing I thought that should happen was that he comes in and offers insight that is sort of wrong, and at that point, the realism of the play has been sort of exploded, so there’s a question of the reality of that moment. We might be in Rocky or one of the campers’ heads.
EB: Can you speak a bit to Luna’s backstory? What’s the significance of her connection to LA, and where do you feel she fits in compared to the other campers?
ES: With Luna, we know she’s been to the camp before, and we decided that the death she experiences is farther back than the rest of the campers. It’s slightly less fresh. Not that it isn’t affecting her daily. But as to her reveal… I wanted to resist the urge to relate everything in this play to grief, although of course, it all is. One of the things about having a loss as a young person, and having it shadow your life, is not knowing who you might’ve become without this experience. If you experience a loss as an adult, you can compare who you were before and after the loss, but if it happens to you when you’re young enough, it begs the question of what part of you is the grief and what part is just who you are. So with Luna, a question about whether or not you can pathologize her actions and explain it as a grief reaction– her not knowing who she is and trying out different personas– or is she just a weirdo trying out her life, attempting to imagine another version of her life?
EB: Are there any particular themes you’re drawn towards?
ES: I write a lot about grief. I love writing adolescence. I love ennui. I think teen girl ennui is very fun. I’m very interested in the Midwest, and growing up in the Midwest, and being bored all the time.
EB: I’m curious about your experience getting into your MFA program. Did you go immediately after college?
ES: I graduated from college in 2020, and then I went home and was in New York for two years, which were partial COVID years. I had written a play in college and decided to put it up at my friend’s apartment in Williamsburg. We got lights from Target and, like, glued the set together, and had the best time. One of my professors ended up coming to see it and told me that I could get a graduate degree for this, so I decided to apply to graduate school. At the time, Annie and Branden were both teaching at UT, and I wanted to work with them.
EB: What did you do for your MFA thesis?
ES: It was not very exciting. Grief Camp was my thesis.
EB: The Atlantic production?
ES: The script. I woke up the day after previews started and did my thesis defense on Zoom. It was bizarre.
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