Sardines (a comedy about death)

Written by Chris Grace

Directed by Eric Michaud

The Huntington

October 11 to November 16, 2025

Way back in the last century, when people appreciated Woody Allen without reservation, I saw all his movies. I loved the sophisticated banter, the underlying expectation that out of seemingly ordinary interactions among searching souls, deep meaning would arise. I sat enraptured, until the white on black end credits rolled. Then I’d feel mildly deflated. Not because the movie ended. Rather because, the depth of meaning anticipated never came to fruition.

The meaning of life celebrated at the end of Woody’s films always struck me as trite, all too often the ambiguous smile of a blossoming young woman. I suppose the triviality was the point. Unless you attach yourself to a particular religion, any of which are insistent upon providing a full-fleshed meaning of life, there really isn’t much point beyond we’re here, so let’s give it a go.

I never revealed my doubts about Woody Allen films. At first because I was a young Turk and he was—WOODY ALLEN—which rendered my reservations discardable. Later, when he became socially suspect, my misgivings became irrelevant.

So I was happy, and hopeful, when Chris Grace shared the same sentiments about Woody Allen movies early on in his one-man show, Sardines (a comedy about death). Further titillating, Mr. Grace announced that by the end of his show, he would make deeper reflections upon the meaning of life.

Sardines is a sixty-minute, one person show performed on a stage with a lovely velvet curtain backdrop and a white stool as the sole prop. Hardly the kind of set for which the opulent Huntington is known. Mr. Grace performs for an animated sixty minutes, all around the stool.

The play is purportedly about death, as its framing device is a family photo from the early 2010’s (which we are engaged to imagine) from which five people have since died. This leads to funny anecdotes of loved ones we’ll never know and clever witticisms about the person Chris Grace. As a comedy, it strikes a chord. As a meditation on death (and therefore the meaning of life), Sardines is mighty lite.

What Sardines did trigger in me, was a meditation on what makes something a play. Plays have existed for thousands of years. There are certain common features among them, though perhaps the only hard and fast rule is that plays are performed live while viewed by a live audience. Plays follow a script; each performance mirrors others. They usually tell a story. They often impart a moral, or at least project a moral perspective. They are sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, occasionally both.

Until the advent of the moving picture, plays were the primary narrative form of collective entertainment. But in these days of movies, television, and TikTok, there are so many ways to follow a story, laugh at a comedy, or sob at tragedy. Why should someone leave their home screen, trudge to a theater, pay gobs of money for a ticket, to sit among potentially infectious people? Because there is a magic in live theater that can only be derived from being present, in-person, among others; watching others, in the flesh, wrangle with the mystery of being human. No image on a screen can induce the same passion, or pathos, as great theater.

Not every live performance is a play. Live music has an aura no recording can touch. Ditto live dance. People still go to live lectures and book readings, in search of the intangible quality of being present together. More and more Boston’s theaters are booked with stand-up comedians. People pay hundreds per ticket to sit in the audience of what will be aired on Netflix, next month, for a paltry subscription price. It’s heartwarming that people still crave the live experience, when the filmed substitute is so much more readily available.

The Huntington produces seven shows a year, a huge undertaking for any theater company. The theater maven in me would like each of them to be full productions of timeless classics and new plays that touch my soul. By that definition, Sardines feels like a cop out. I can appreciate that The Huntington is striving to expand our notion of what constitutes performance art worthy of their stages. But Sardines so perfectly fits into the existing model of a streamed comedy special, I am hard pressed to understand why it’s imperative to see it live. I think Chris Grace should have performed it for two nights at the Wilbur, and then we could all watch it from home.

As the sixty minutes whittled to its end, did Mr. Grace provide more depth of meaning to death than Woody Allen? I will let those of you who go see Sardines decide for yourselves. For me, as I left the theater I reckoned the remainder of my week—tutoring a Haitian immigrant struggling with our language, dinner with my Louise Eustace Fellows, participating in a medical research study—and decided I had enough reason to shoulder on.