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Portland audiences will receive the first look at comedian Chris Grace’s newest show, 27 Hours, when it debuts at Kickstand Comedy this Friday, June 20.
“Call this a preview of a work in progress,” Grace says. “I don’t know if I can lower the bar any more than that.”
Grace plans to write and perform a new show every day of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, for a total of 27 shows in August. The Kickstand show is “hour zero” of the project, giving Grace a chance to test run the concept before he gets to Edinburgh. He will write the show the morning of June 20.
He’s found success with the one-hour solo show format at the Fringe before. In 2023, Grace debuted Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson there, a critique of Hollywood inspired by Johansson’s role as a Japanese cyborg in the 2017 film Ghost in the Shell. That show will wrap up its monthlong run at Portland Center Stage at The Armory on June 22 before heading to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in July. Grace is best known for his role as Jerry on NBC’s Superstore and recently appeared in Netflix’s The Residence.
27 Hours is a creative exercise for Grace to generate a ton of new material in one month, he says. He assumes he’ll hit a wall around the midway point but is really interested to see what happens when he is forced to push through. “It’s almost guaranteed to fail” at some point during the run, he says.
“I’m doing it because I thought, this would be a really bad idea,” Grace says of 27 Hours. “And I told some friends, and they also thought it would be a bad idea. But it stayed in my head.”
SEE IT: Chris Grace: 27 Hours at Kickstand Comedy, 1006 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 503-719-5685, kickstandcomedy.org. 10 pm Friday, June 20. $11–$14. 21+.