Interview: At 27, Eliya Smith Talks About Debuting Her Play Grief Camp Off-Broadway

Eliya Smith is making her off-Broadway playwriting debut with Grief Camp, a moving, lightly surreal study of loss and adolescence. Running through May 11 at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, the production began performances on January 9 but was halted after two previews following a strike action by backstage production workers. An agreement between Atlantic and IATSE was ratified on March 25, and performances have now resumed.

The setting of Grief Camp looks a lot like any other summer camp. In a rickety cabin in the woods near Hurt, Virginia, six teenagers share a packed schedule of activities each day, then pile into bunk beds at night. They argue, throw fits, and bond. But at this camp, all the kids are recovering from a recent loss.

Smith sat down with TheaterMania to talk about making off-Broadway debut, keeping the grief “on the edges,” and working with veteran director Les Waters.

The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Even as you make your off-Broadway debut with Grief Camp, you are still finishing your final year at University of Texas at Austin in their playwriting graduate program. How did that come to happen?
I’m very lucky. Annie Baker teaches at UT Austin, so I assisted her on Infinite Life [produced by Atlantic in fall 2023] after my first year. On the first day of rehearsals, one of the actors had flight delays and couldn’t make it for the table read, so I read their role. Afterwards [Atlantic artistic director] Neil Pepe was like, “Who are you?”

At the end of our second year, UT hosts a play festival. Neil came to Austin, saw a reading of Grief Camp, and a month later offered me the production. It was so surreal. I didn’t have an agent at the time. I was down to make scrappy theater for the next 10 years. But by September of that year, on my 27th birthday, we were doing auditions for my off-Broadway premiere.

There are actual grief camps for young people who have suffered loss. Did you do research on the real thing?
When I heard about the existence of grief camps, I thought: “That feels like something I could write.” I started getting fed TikToks from one of the summer camps, and the videos were so moving. But the kids were talking really explicitly about grief in a way that, unfortunately, would have felt like bad writing.

You mean the kids understood their grief to a degree that wouldn’t have felt true on stage, even though it is true.
There is a documentary version that could capture that. And honestly, I did write a lot of that stuff early on. I wrote one-on-ones, I wrote conversations between the campers talking about the grief. But I felt like it was doing a disservice to the characters, because young people are both more and less articulate about grief than you want people in a play to be.

Instead, we mostly see the moments in between the grief-related exercises these kids are doing. We only get bits and pieces of information about the loss each of them has suffered.
The challenge was figuring out how to keep the grief in there without forcing it in. A lot of that came from building out the reality of the camp. On a heavily scheduled day where you’re doing all of these exercises, they just wouldn’t be talking about it that much. Because at this camp, they are talking about it all day.

There is a surreal tone to the play, and the passage of time feels very uncertain. In the script, you say that it should feel like “a time soup.” Why was that important?
When you’re grieving, just getting through a day is so intense. We wanted to capture how it changes the texture of day-to-day life. Any time someone dies it feels like the world is breaking, but that’s doubly true for young people who are still tenuously able to understand how the world works. So I wanted to give people the experience of living in a child brain that has experienced a rupture of reality in that way.

Can I ask…did you have an experience of grief as a child?

I did, yes. Something in my reaction to what you were saying?
You don’t have to go into it at all.

No, I’m happy to. My father died when I was 16. You were reminding me that the first time I hung out with my friends afterwards, they just made no mention of it at all. They just didn’t know how to talk about it, because their reality hadn’t ruptured.
It’s a lonely experience. So when I heard about grief camps, I wondered about being in a community where the central puncture of grief is not the isolating element of it. But then I realized, it would still be isolating. However much it is shared, each person still has their own pain and can’t totally reach across the void to others, as much as they are trying to.

Right. Olivia tells Cade, her counselor, that he has no idea “what it’s like” for her, and he replies, “Actually I do.” As if to say, that’s the whole point of this place, we all understand. But she hates that, because her pain is different from his pain.
Yes. And they are both right.

It is tough material, and you have a young company—but they are led by Les Waters, who is a legendary figure and longtime theatrical veteran. What has that collaboration process been like?
It has been a dream. I was initially unsure, because Les is at the height of his career—whereas I had never done anything like this before, and our cast is super young. But the cast loves Les, and he loves the cast. I get so moved just watching him interact with them. He did such an amazing job of making everyone in the cast feel like they had such ownership over the play. It has been a dream of a first collaboration.