Grief certainly makes for good drama: Unpredictable, unreliable and messy, it can be a great basis for an emotionally intense play. Unfortunately, in Grief Camp, the new play written by Eliya Smith in her off-Broadway debut running through May 11 at the Atlantic Theater Company, grief is less dramatic than it is befuddling.

The play appears to follow a group of kids and young adults who have gathered at a camp in aptly named Hurt, Virginia, to attend the titular camp and mourn their losses together. The kids grieve in different ways: One is writing a solo play that becomes increasingly unwieldy as she develops it, another is leveraging her burgeoning sexuality to feel any kind of emotion other than hurt. Another—a counselor—is older and more capable of emotional regulation, and copes with his pain by trying to help others heal.

It’s a good basis for character studies, and it could be a compelling drama, but Smith—still a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin—favors style over substance, and we rarely get to scratch the surfaces of any of the characters.

Smith uses a mix of dramatic devices that seem to have little to do with one another—rapid transitions, overlapping dialogue, random fights that apparently evolve from nowhere, a random storm and a guitarist who occasionally appears to play music or listen to the kids vent. But because these moments rarely evolve from the characters’ situations or the (admittedly thin) storyline, they have little emotional impact for the audience. And because this is an ensemble piece that only runs 90 minutes, we don’t have time to delve deeply into the characters’ backstories and various traumas.

Smith also takes steps to emphasize the youth of the campers, and depicts their immaturity in various ways—how they flirt (awkwardly), how they play with the items in their lodge (including a box fan that gives them Darth Vader voices) and how they melt down (or shut down) when they don’t get their way. These moments are much more effective, and hint at what the play could have been.

Louisa Thompson’s sets and Oana Boetz’s costumes do a nice job of setting the time and place, while Isabella Byrd’s lights are nicely atmospheric and effectively convey both the characters’ inner darkness and the light of healing.

The young cast is undeniably talented, and certain moments offer hints of what they could accomplish with a stronger script. Smith, as a playwright, also shows promise, but this debut play is ultimately a disappointment. May the next one—or a reworking of this one—be stronger.