By Robert Israel

Chris Grace invites us to think about mortality with him, to learn something from his stories, and to share a few heartwarming laughs along the way.

Sardines (a comedy about death), a one-act, one-man show written and performed by Chris Grace. Directed by Eric Michaud. At the Michael Maso Studio, Huntington Theatre, 264 Huntington Ave., Boston, through November 16.

Chris Grace performing his one-man show Sardines. Photo: courtesy of the Huntington Theatre Company

Several years ago, a fellow Rhode Islander, the late Spalding Gray, who took the art of the one-man show to new heights with Swimming to Cambodia, Sex and Death to the Age 14, and Monster in Box, among others, shared a definition of a monologuist with me. Gray claimed that his training in acting at Boston’s Emerson College was crucial to his success. “I’m the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life,” Gray said. “But I’m also an actor … and I use that training to play myself.” Most of us can expound on our own stories, he noted; we love to talk about ourselves. But being a monologuist requires drawing on that training as an actor in order to transform those true life stories into compelling theater.

Chris Grace brings considerable acting chops to his show Sardines, honed by performing before audiences over several decades, on stage, in films, on television, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He engages audiences, invites them in, sharing stories about family and friends who — willingly or not — become co-conspirators who enable him to reveal intimacies of humor, loss, and perseverance.

At age 52, he tells us, he’s been through considerable loss. Death, for Grace, is what the late poet Ted Berrigan defined as when “someone passes from your outside life to inside.” We learn about people — friends, a lover, family members — once close, who may have moved to the outskirts through circumstance or estrangement but who, in death, become indelible memories.

As a way to dramatize these losses, Grace creates an imaginary slide show in which images we never see become visible to us. He tells us what his relationships give him (and, in several cases, where they fall short). In one heart-wrenching moment, he takes us to his bedroom where his lover, struggling with a bad case of the flu, succumbs to a heart attack. Grace recreates his lover’s final moments, describes his efforts to revive the man, details when the EMTs arrive at his apartment, and how his loss ultimately shadows his life at that moment and afterward. It is not merely recounting a chain of events, but, as Spalding Gray taught us, by using acting skills, the monologuist takes us into the experience so that we feel the pain, the loss, the grief.

The show includes numerous references to popular culture — songs, films, performing artists — and many of these references may be lost on the audience. An openly gay man, Grace perhaps reminds us a bit too often about his sexuality, and that his husband, Eric Michaud, is directing him in this production. (Anyone who read the playbill knows that already.) A few other repetitive details could be excised from the show. Still, the performer’s references to his sexuality are used to illuminate significant events, and that is essential to the production. For example, we learn about his father’s severe disapproval of Grace after he came out as gay, and how, over the years, that disapproval never waned. We also learn how deeply Grace cared for his dad, despite his disapproval, and how he ministered to his father’s health needs during his final days.

There are moments in the show when Grace’s acting skills hamper the fluidity he needs to tell a story. He is skilled enough as a monologuist to catch himself and, in most instances, pulls himself back from chewing the scenery. And because Grace is performing before a live audience, some members seated near me during the performance I attended vocally reminded him he’d gone a bit afield with a couple of his shticks.

Overall, Grace is humbled by the topic of death and all that it implies. Death, as the poet e. e. cummings once reminded us, is “evil and legal.” Given that grim inevitability, we had better embrace death and, in so doing, treasure people we hold close.

Chris Grace invites us to take that journey of introspection with him, and there is something to learn from it, as well as to share a few heartwarming laughs along the way.

Robert Israel, an Arts Fuse contributor since 2013, can be reached at risrael_97@yahoo.com.