Review: Stand-Up Meets Grief in Grace Aki’s To Free a Mockingbird

Theater nerds who like to stay up to date will recognize Grace Aki’s voice as the co-host of Broadway Radio’s Today on Broadway. In To Free a Mockingbird, her solo show in which she traces the ties between generations of her Japanese and American Southern family, some of Aki’s best throwaway lines are up-to-the-minute Broadway jokes, playful adlibs about this year’s Tony contenders.

Despite its strong links to the theater world, To Free a Mockingbird, now running at the SoHo Playhouse, still feels closer to a stand-up show than hybrid comedy-theater pieces by the likes of Hannah Gadsby, Mike Birbiglia, and Alex Edelman, who interweave the very funny and the very harrowing (or, at least, the very poignant). Aki, fortunately, with her appealingly frenetic delivery, is successful with the very funny, barreling through her tales with rocket speed that leaves just enough time to catch each joke before she’s on to the next.

Her story begins with the intercultural courtship of her Japanese grandmother and her Southern grandpaw, paralleled first by the marriage, and then contentious divorce, of her parents and followed by Aki’s own ill-fated love story. She amusingly undercuts expectations for how family romances are going to go. “We actually have these letters,” she declares dramatically, referencing her grandparents’ star-crossed overseas correspondence, “and they’re not well-written. It’s not The Notebook.” Later she describes how her father left her mother for his secretary. “I love that he got to work with his wife,” she coos. “That’s beautiful.”

Her storytelling distinguishes itself early on through her viciously blasé revelations of traumatic bombshells: She alludes to horrors in each generation of her family, including her own personal life, with a joltingly fleet touch, and it’s these casual casualties that best command audience attention. She seems most at ease approaching the darkness in her family’s past in deliberate drive-by style, making the light-footed repression of that pain part of the act: Jokes land with sharp sucker-punchlines.

But rather than climaxing these barbed asides, there’s instead a very swift tonal pivot in the final third of the show to something much more somber that never fully settles into place. Because Aki’s approach to her own trauma suddenly feels very different than it did before, it gets harder to know when to laugh. And when that tonal curveball arrives, there’s insufficient sense that the show’s varied thematic threads (bicultural identity, family dysfunction, the secrets loved ones keep from each other) have all been working together to build toward a heartbreaking finale.

To Free a Mockingbird concludes with Aki playing a lengthy recording of her own eulogy for her father, complete with the funereal audience’s raw laughter on the tape. Though it’s a speech that obviously wasn’t written for the play, her eulogy on its own achieves something deeply moving that the show doesn’t quite do over the course of its 75 minutes—achingly intermingle grief and the reflexive humor necessary to survive it.