The childhood game Sardines involves a version of hide and seek in which players find one another and hide together, taking players out of the game one by one, leaving a single player wandering alone by the end. For sitcom actor and comedian Chris Grace, that’s what losing multiple members of his family in quick succession felt like.
Grace performed his one-man comedy act “Sardines (a comedy about death)” at The Huntington Theatre on Sept. 30 to a crowd of 250. The show, which originally premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, will run until Nov. 6. After acting on the sitcom “Superstore,” Grace has starred in previous one-man comedy shows such as “Chris Grace as Scarlett Johansson,” and he focuses overall on shows that redefine the traditional stand up comedy set up.
The show is presented in the intimate Maso Studio of The Huntington, a black box theater. Grace pantomimes using a slideshow and the presence of lighting and audio cues. In an interview with The Beacon, Grace discussed the development of the show and how it came to be a more deconstructed theatrical experience.
He didn’t want much tech in the show, because his last show was very tech heavy and it made the performance difficult to tour with.
“I was just like, ‘I’m so tired of all this tech that I have to do.’ I want to do a show that’s more bare bones,” Grace said.
Grace went into the development process thinking the show would be closer to traditional stand-up comedy, but the darker thematic elements of the show, such as losing a partner and the subsequent immense grief, called for a more deconstructed approach.
The show follows his family and personal life closely, detailing a succession of losses in Grace’s life, such as his brother, his partner, and his mother and father. Each taught him life lessons about the power of memory and cherishing time with loved ones while they’re alive.
He decided not to show any images of his relatives during the performance. Despite that, he kept miming pulling up a photo on a projector that was taken of his family many years ago, which served as a focal point for the show’s narrative.
“I wanted people to not feel like the show was just a slideshow of my own life; I wanted people to think more about their own family,” Grace said.
He compared the imagination needed from the audience to fill in the gaps that tech would have filled to that required when reading a novel. He wanted the audience to feel fully “invested” in the performance by filling in the blanks themselves.
Grace spoke of his process of naming the show, stating how “Sardines” pointed to a metaphor that was not included in the show’s final form.
“My power is that at any moment, I can tap into a very deep well of sadness, which is actually useful at times as an actor, and functional as a comedian as well,” he said. “It was sort of this gift that was given, but one that most people would not want.”
“Like, if you won a lifetime supply of anchovies, you would never be hungry again. But it’s not what you want. So, I was going to call the show ‘Anchovies’.”
But when he remembered the childhood game called Sardines, he changed the title to allow for multiple layers of meaning.
“I changed that first metaphor to ‘if you’re given a lifetime supply of sardines,’ but eventually that just fell out of the show, leaving [the meaning] to be just the child’s game,” Grace said.
One of the most memorable and hilarious interludes in the performance was when Grace led the audience in an a cappella rendition of “Please Don’t Stop the Music” by Rihanna. Within the composition of the song, he found another extension of his metaphor for mortality.
“There’s only two chords in the whole song. It just goes back and forth…it’s also melancholy and reflective of this feeling of when you are going out to the club and you want to just dance, because you don’t want to think about the problems of the world,” Grace said. “It sort of creates the illusion that this song will keep going on forever.”
He split the audience into three sections and had two sing a repeating line while the third sang the chorus that, layered together, sounded like the song.
“It is a leap of faith,” he said, “but [the audience] has done it every time.”
A harrowing moment in the show is when Grace describes watching his past partner go into cardiac arrest and not being able to do anything to save him. The performer shared that, in the middle of that moment, he remembered thinking that it would make a great story one day for a show.
“If you’re a creative person, you generally do have some necessity to have both yourself and an observer inside yourself,” Grace said. “I just think that some people naturally have a predilection for noticing what life is about and trying to tell other people about it.”
This voice allowed him to catalog everything in the moment rather than rely on memory.
“When you recreate things, the edges will get smoothed out, and you will rewrite the story in a way that’s even colored, even if you write it the next day,” Grace said.
Comedy has long been a way for Grace to cope with his struggles and loss. For him, “Sardines” was a way to convey multiple darker and more somber stories in a personable manner to the audience.
“[The performance has] a very straightforward and not super calculated approach,” Grace said. “I think it’s working because this is a subject matter that people seem to really want some plain talk about. That’s why it resonates with people.”
