Good Grief: “Life in This House Is Over”

“Grief can also be something very subtle; it can be the feeling of things shaking loose,” remarks Samantha Shay, director of “Life in This House Is Over,” which will be performed at PS21 in Chatham on August 15 and 16.

This work, which combines dance, music, and theater, wasn’t triggered by an event in Shay’s life. Just the opposite: It’s a theme she’s been mulling over for years. At 16, Shay was diagnosed with a chronic medical condition (diabetes), and found consolation in the gracious, wistful, mildly tragic plays of Anton Chekhov. The playwright himself suffered from a terminal disease: tuberculosis. “He was writing at the precipice of tremendous change and uncertainty, which is what we find ourselves in,” Shay says. “He was predicting, in a way, revolution.” The title of Shay’s piece, and some of the dialogue, come from Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.”

Grief is not unitary: there are griefs within griefs. And mourning need not be entirely personal. One may grieve for a nation, for a way of life. In the US today, both left and right find themselves often filled with grief. 

As a 22-year-old, Shay trained at the Moscow Art Theatre School for two months—the company that produced the original Chekhov plays.

Since then, research has been an intrinsic part of her creative style. Another of Shay’s influences is Pina Bausch (1940-2009), the renowned German choreographer whose deadpan athleticism incorporated mundane gestures of daily life. In her choreography, dancers often wear street clothes and walk between tables and chairs and beds. “Probably the reason I became a director was seeing her work,” Shay recalls. “I thought I was going to be an actor, and I saw Pina Bausch and started making my own pieces.” In 2021, Shay received a Fulbright grant to study Bausch’s history. This brought her to the small city of Wuppertal, Germany, home of Tanztheater, the choreographer’s troupe. Shay was a guest artist and researcher with the company for two seasons, and continues to work for them as a freelancer. (She remains in Wuppertal.) Julie Shanahan, a celebrated member of Bausch’s troupe, appears in “Life in This House Is Over.”

From Tanztheater, Shay learned the art of the small emphatic motion. A woman slowly pushing away a tomato, across a dinner table, expresses grief more powerfully than convulsive weeping.

This spring Shay was a special research fellow at the drama school of Yale University, where she studied Russian avant-garde film theory, and read the book Hauntology by Merlin Coverley, which suggests that theater is a function of memory.

Shay is not a traditional director. “Especially in the very beginning, I give the performers a text or a piece of music or an image that came to me, and they present ideas,” she explains. “Then we figure out which ideas we will keep, and I start drafting it into a structure.” Shay trusts her performers to help shape the “script.” In a sense, she’s more like an editor than a writer, though at moments she takes control of the action.

There’s no word for this genre, which combines movement, dialogue, music, conflict between characters. The phrase “dance theater” is not terribly evocative. A new term should be coined—something like “torso-speaking.”

The performance also includes singing, including an Eastern European folksong that transforms into a lament. “In the piece, there are actors who are trained in lamentation,” Shay explains.

“Life in This House Is Over” has been performed twice: in Wroclaw, Poland, and Reykjavík, Iceland. Shay is excited to bring the work to the land of her birth.

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This article appears in August 2025.