Earlier this year, the New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman wrote about a trend that seems to be dominating the comedy scene: grief. Blame the pandemic, blame a new generation of comics who are perhaps more in touch with their emotions because they’re in therapy, but mourning is pervasive in comedy sets these days.
This month, comedian and actor Rachel Bloom continues in that tradition with her off-Broadway production Death, Let Me Do My Show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Bloom is probably best known as the co-creator of the television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a musical comedy with some semi-autobiographical elements, including ones pertaining to Bloom’s own mental health struggles.
Using comedy as a means of processing pain and struggle is nothing new for Bloom, who wrote songs on her television show with titles like “Anti-depressants Are So Not a Big Deal,” but the pandemic ushered in a new chapter for her. In March of 2020, shortly after bringing her newborn daughter home from the hospital, she learned that her close friend and writing partner Adam Schlesinger had died from complications of COVID-19.
Bloom marches onto the stage at the Lortel clad in a sequined pantsuit and shiny silver pumps and proceeds to deliver some lighthearted material—a ditty about a tree that smells like semen, for example. But she is soon interrupted by the looming specter of death. Death, in this show, is an actual character (portrayed by her Crazy Ex-Girlfriend costar David Hull), and Bloom is not happy to see him. “All I wanted to do for an hour was pretend it was 2019,” she tells him, “to pretend it was before a time that you came and fucked everything up.”
Quickly, it becomes clear that Death won’t stop nagging her until she talks about him. She tries to appease him with stories about the fraudulent death of her dog (too complicated to get into here), but eventually she is intimidated into sharing the real meat of her grief: the fear of losing her newborn daughter, who spent several days in the NICU because of fluid in her lungs, and the loss of her close friend.
Bloom spoke with Vogue after the show about the process of putting the show together without her writing partner. Working on and performing the material was her personal approach to processing the trauma, but she also hopes that it will urge others not to forget the collective trauma of the pandemic. “I think not talking about things is often the worst part of any hard emotion,” she says.
Much of the show is less about comedy than pure storytelling, as she unpacks some of the most difficult moments in her life. Yet in classic Bloom fashion, she breaks up these gloomy monologues with musical interludes, each one reminding the audience that we are allowed to—and are, in fact, supposed to—laugh.
In less than 90 minutes, Bloom manages to grapple with a universal question that the pandemic amplified: “How do I acknowledge death but continue to live?” If she hasn’t quite found the answer, she’s at least managed to make us all smile while trying.
Death, Let Me Do My Show runs through September 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the West Village.