Annie Baker, the minimalist playwright best known for her Pulitzer-winning drama The Flick, casts a long shadow over a new generation of playwrights. But it’s not enough to write a naturalistic story with prolonged silences, a reality that’s proven in a swath of shows like Elya Smith’s Grief Camp, now playing at Atlantic Theater’s Linda Gross Theater in Chelsea. The setting is a summer sleepaway camp for teenagers coping with the loss of a loved one, where a group of four girls and (improbably) two boys are bunked together in a cabin (nicely designed by Louisa Thompson) along with an earnest counselor in his early 20s (Jack DiFalco).

In short, often humorous scenes, we watch as these youngsters grapple with the ordinary experiences of teenagers everywhere along with the particulars of coming to terms with death. Many default to a kind of fabulism. There’s a precocious but immature girl (Maaike Laanstra-Corn) who’s writing fantasy fiction stories that deal with obvious metaphors about placing mother figures in boxes and an ocean with low self esteem. There’s also a spunky Midwesterner (Grace Brennan) who presents herself as an L.A. hipster, a ruse that her peers indulge rather than puncture.

The two boys in the cabin (Arjun Athalye and Dominic Gross) are so sketchily drawn that it’s unclear exactly who they’re mourning. Meanwhile, a bearded guy dubbed Guitarist (Alden Harris-McCoy) occasionally pops up strumming a tune — it’s not clear if he’s meant to also be the camp director whose voice we hear in aphorism-heavy morning announcements (“Your suffering has become your glory”) that become increasingly bizarre and inappropriate over time.

The most compelling storyline is the one that emerges between DiFalco’s young counselor, Cade, a former camper who lost his mom when he was 13, and 17-year-old Olivia (a wonderfully forthright Renée-Nicole Powell), who deflects her guilt over her role in her sister’s death into various forms of acting out. Mostly, this involves frank, boundary-pushing sex talk and shameless flirting with Cade, which he handles with patience and maturity. But director Les Waters bizarrely stages most of their scenes with the two actors at opposite ends of the stage. Surely a teenager girl seeking to transgress sexually would be trying to invade her romantic target’s personal space.

Smith has a fine ear for how young women talk, and there’s a wonderful quirkiness to how she shapes her scenes. But there’s also a diffuseness here, with interactions that lead to nowhere in terms of character development or building the narrative, and moments of theatricality like onstage rain (effects by Jeremy Chernick) that lead to neither confrontation nor catharsis. A late scene in which one character tries to summarize what she’s learned from her grief journey feels tacked on, and the opposite of the real-time naturalism of the rest of the piece. Grief Camp, like the campers it depicts, is stuck in an inchoate space where it has not yet come to terms with all its issues. ★★☆☆☆

GRIEF CAMP
Linda Gross Theater at Atlantic Theater Company, Off Broadway
Running time: 85 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through May 11 for $57 to $112