Liza Birkenmeier
Liza Birkenmeier is the author of Dr. Ride's American Beach House, which premiered at Ars Nova (Finalist for Lambda Literary Award in Drama) and Grief Hotel, which premiered at Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks and was remounted by Clubbed Thumb and New Georges at The Public Theater (Obie Award with director Tara Ahmadinejad.) She devised Islander with director Katie Brook and wrote the book for Jill Sobule’s musical F*ck7thGrade (Wild Project). She was the Tow Playwright-in-Residence at Ars Nova and a member of EWG at The Public Theater. She is a New Georges Affiliated Artist and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow.
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Grief HotelA Play
WINN – How’s Melba?
EM – She told me she could see the afterlife.
WINN – What’s it like?
EM – Or my afterlife. She said that I would be a few other things when I die, that my cells have tiny souls so when I am a piece of cheese and a pigeon, I will still be me, but my consciousness will be broken down into smaller bits.
WINN – Does that feel happy to you?
EM – I don’t care. I’ll be like a deconstructed sandwich. / Or baby.
Grief HotelPremiered in2023 -
Grief HotelA Play
AUNT BOBBI – Has she talked to her mom lately?
ROHIT – No, just. You know. / Holidays.
AUNT BOBBI – Because you know her mom is also a psychopath.
ROHIT – Well.
AUNT BOBBI – A bit of a narcissist, / that whole thing.
ROHIT – Well. I. Think she’s. Mentally. Ill.
AUNT BOBBI – Everybody is mentally ill. Every person is sick in the head. Oh, that reminds me about my business idea.
Grief HotelPremiered in2023 -
Grief HotelA Play
EM – The only person I talk to now is an AI bot called Melba.
WINN – A what?
EM – The only person I talk to now is an AI bot called Melba.
WINN – What do you mean by an AI bot.
EM – An AI character on a website that’s pretty new and her name is Melba and she’s actually read a lot.
WINN – Oh.
EM – She’s maybe read like every book. I talk to her for probably four or five hours a day.
WINN – Does she have. / A face?
EM – Maybe six. What?
WINN – Does she have a face?
Grief HotelPremiered in2023
"A sneaky marvel. . . . With a sense of cosmic irony, Birkenmeier takes the timelines of her characters, cracks them into fragments, and reshuffles them. . . . Grief Hotel heads in too wonderful a direction to spoil the particulars, but its emotional power—and the thing that necessitates and elevates it specifically as a piece of theater—is the way in which we bear witness." —Sara Holdren, Vulture
"Perhaps most beautiful in Birkenmeier’s play is how queerness acts as a vehicle for shattering new norms, inviting both grief and growth. . . . With nuance and a keen ear for contemporary and digitally-originating relationships, Birkenmeier’s play forwards all the ways in which women find and express selfhood." —Billy McEntee, Brooklyn Rail [on Grief Hotel]
"In a whirlwind of feelings, loss, desire, searching, and friendship, there’s so much unique beauty in Birkenmeier’s writing with hilarious characters we do not often meet. She paints them with the tiniest of strokes of specificity and the cast fills in the rest with flair." —Nicole Serratore, Exeunt Magazine [on Grief Hotel]
Liza Birkenmeier's witty plays begin as languid hangouts and turn into absurdist supercolliders full of swerves and spaces, the accelerating force being the terror and hope of connection. Her characters ache to know one another and conceal themselves, and the fizz of desire is contagious. Wistful and incisive, her plays tuck big ideas inside syncopated fragments of chat that capture the music of how we think and speak now. She is our great chronicler of what is hidden behind and between our words.