A man shelters from torrential rain in a hotel across the road from the palliative care ward in which his father died just hours earlier. Trapped by flooding, he finds in progress a conference devoted to that most noble and pressing of pursuits: the reinvention of the humanities.
When word of his bereavement spreads, self-interested conference goers obsessed with professional rivalries and their own advancement see an opportunity and begin, by turns, to coerce him into delivering the closing keynote. Amid intellectual grandstanding and underhanded careerism, pressure mounts – and floodwaters continue to rise.Set over twenty-four rain-soaked hours, The Department explores the tension between the experience and the performance of grief in a blazing satire of institutional decline, a send-up of self-satisfied corporate academia.
