REVIEW: Chris Grace's "Sardines - a comedy about death"
A work-in-progress at Hollywood Fringe Festival, June 15th
“This is a comedy”, Chris Grace reminds the audience, roughly 10 minutes into his vulnerable and sprightly new show Sardines. Grace has just wheeled out an (invisible) projector showing (invisible) photos that he flips through with an (invisible) remote, saying that the choice was to engage the imagination of the audience - and, of course, to save $400. The photo he “shows” the audience is a family portrait from 2011 featuring Grace with his sister, brother, father, mother, and partner. He then delivers the crushing line that sets the show into motion: all five of these people are now dead. This is a comedy.
As the title implies, death is the main focus of the show, with Grace taking us on a tour of grief through his dry, relaxed style of stand-up comedy. Dressed head-to-toe in white, he is a warm, engaging guide through moments in his life that are both difficult and too easy to imagine: after jumping quickly through two of the deaths, his slow-burn recreation of the third is terrifyingly vivid, a collection of images, moments, and emotions that seems to be happening in front of us on an empty stage. Exploring death through comedy is not a novel thing - Grace ponders Woody Allen’s frequent meditations on death (“One of the top two most disturbing things about Woody Allen”), and I thought of Marc Maron’s recent From Bleak to Dark that similarly stares right into the abyss of death with riffs, devastating lines, and raw honesty.
What sets Grace apart from his seriocomic peers is his full utilization of theatrical devices to build a communal bulwark against the pain of the material. He and director Eric Michaud forego tech in favor of audience engagement, from asking them to imagine the majority of the technical cues to building a meta, sing-a-long section that, in the performance I attended, surged with energy and laughter. The atmosphere of the entire production was casual and focused - I felt absolutely at ease playing along and collaborating with this roomful of strangers, before being hypnotized again by one of Grace’s stories.
The very idea of familial death is impossible to capture and explore in 50 minutes, and I longed for more memories and details of the family members that are sketched out by Grace. Despite the brevity of the piece, it is an emotionally cathartic and very funny act of love that might not answer the question of if art can heal, but yet is effective simply for braving to exist in that question. Grace, with the utmost sincerity, claims that dying alone isn’t that bad, and he makes a great case. But Sardines creates an environment that reminds us that we’re not alone, and living together is just as much of a good thing.
Sardines is playing June 20th, 25th, and 30th at The Broadwater Studio before transferring to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Tickets are HERE.