88% is my attempt to wrestle with how a thoughtful person in these chaotic times can bring nuance into a world where black-and-white thinking and appeals to power seem to be far more effective. It’s also about what kinds of soup they serve at gay saunas.
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/chris-grace-88
- 88% explores life in the grey areas rather than the extremes — why do you think nuance has become such a difficult thing to talk about in modern culture?
I think nuance is hard to communicate in pithy sound bites. Most of the big questions in our lives take at least the space of one berry cider to discuss, if not a full pepperoni pizza. - Your work often combines sharp comedy with surprising vulnerability; what draws you to finding humour in subjects that many people might consider uncomfortable or difficult?
It’s not anything specifically intentional; it just ends up boiling down to my personal taste and what I find interesting about any given situation… in real life I can’t really go that long without thinking of a joke or some way of cutting through the mood, so that mix inevitably ends up in my shows, too! - The show asks questions rather than offering easy answers — how has your relationship with uncertainty changed as you’ve gotten older, both onstage and off?
I’m pretty comfortable with the mystery these days… I’ve been through heaps of it and I’ve come out the other side. You could positively look at this — I’m optimistic about thriving through struggle — or through a darker lens — I’m pretty confident that you’ll make it through every struggle you are presented with except the ones that you… don’t. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but some things do just kill you. - Having built a career across improv, musical comedy, television and stand-up, what have those different disciplines taught you about connecting with an audience?
Improv and stand-up have taught me the most about staying micro-focused on the present moment; musical comedy taught me that there are alternate paths to someone’s brain… sometimes a spoonful of melody helps the message go down. Television taught me that sometimes a moment of stillness invites an audience to see themselves in the character instead of always feeling like you have to push for a laugh. - Last year’s 27 Hours saw you create a brand-new show every day of the Fringe — after setting yourself a challenge like that, what still scares or excites you creatively?
My show this year is more of a traditional stand-up show; I’m interested to see if audiences want to see me perform without as much theatrical trappings. There’s also the fear of just saying things I think are true as opposed to palatable. - Audiences know you for being both hilarious and deeply thoughtful; what conversations are you hoping people might continue having long after they leave 88%?
I’ve gotten good responses along this line so far in previews; I think the truth is that reality is overwhelming at the moment and none of our brains was really meant to hold it all in, even though we have an intense human desire to “figure it out”. So trying to parse out the chaos so that we can live a relatively sane life… and doing that in public, on-stage, seems to encourage people to think more deeply about what they want to their world to be and what they can do to get it there.