Sam Kissajukian, in 300 Paintings (Photo: American Repertory Theater)
In an age when so much of what we see and hear has been filtered, polished, or generated by code, Boston’s stages are offering something almost shocking in its simplicity: unadorned truth. Three current productions — Sardines, starring Chris Grace; 300 Paintings, performed by Sam Kissajukian; and the Lyric Stage Company’s revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town — share a quiet but subversive mission. Each dismantles convention and dares to present something utterly human — flawed, unguarded, unvarnished. In a cultural moment haunted by deepfakes, synthetic voices, and curated selves, these works remind us of the irreplaceable electricity that passes between living people when someone dares to be real.
Theater has always been a kind of human-based technology — a way of making sense of our lives through shared imagination. But right now its power feels renewed. The more our world fills with artificial replicas of experience, the more meaningful it becomes to sit in a room with other human beings and watch an artist expose something personal and alive. These three performances are bound not by genre but by an ethic: each insists that authenticity itself can be an act of resistance.
Chris Grace’s one-man show Sardines joyously defies classification. Known for his work in Superstore and This Is Us, Grace brings an anarchic blend of stand-up, confession, and absurdist theater to the stage. The result is both hilarious and disarming — a show that shape-shifts between self-deprecating humor and startling honesty about race, sexuality, struggle, and death. Grace’s performance is rule-breaking in the best sense because it abandons the traditional arc of a comedy set or play. Instead, it unfolds like a conversation that keeps circling back on itself, pushing deeper, refusing resolution.
What makes Sardines remarkable is not its polish but its refusal to be slick. Grace uses comedy not as camouflage but as a kind of emotional x-ray. Every laugh carries a sting of recognition. Watching him is to feel the artist’s mind at work in real time — the risk of exposure, the joy of connection, the permission to be messy. In that messiness lies something we rarely get anymore: a reminder that authenticity isn’t tidy, it’s alive.
If Sardines is sharply vulnerable, 300 Paintings — the creation of Australian comedian and painter Sam Kissajukian — finds its authenticity in another kind of extremity. The show chronicles a year when Kissajukian withdrew from his prior life and entered a period of manic creativity. He began painting obsessively, producing hundreds of works while grappling with mental illness and self-doubt. Onstage, surrounded by projections of these works, he recounts his experience with a mix of sharp comedic timing, philosophical musing, and raw personal confession.
Kissajukian’s paintings function less as crafted objects than as living records — urgent marks left by a psyche in flux. They carry the pulse of survival rather than the calm of reflection. His process collapses the usual distance between art and life; the making itself becomes a form of self-preservation, the performance an act of integration.
As a visual artist, I am moved by this immediacy even as I recognize how different it is from the slow, deliberate evolution of a finely tuned visual language. My own path — like that of many artists devoted to finding forms that resonate and possess a mystery of their own — depends on the mindful shaping of images that can speak across time and beyond the self. Expression, for me, is only the beginning. Art requires articulation — a careful honing of intention and form. Intention is what transforms expression from catharsis into something more universal: from the private act of making into an offering that can stand on its own and speak to others.
In that light, 300 Paintings captures the moment before that transformation — the raw edge where art is still molten, before it cools into form. Kissajukian’s work feels like standing in the middle of a storm: immediate, unfiltered, profoundly human. What he gives us is the charged space where creation and survival meet — a reminder that all art begins in vulnerability, even if not all of it stays there.
His show, part memoir and part absurdist theater, ultimately wins the audience to his side completely. When he invites viewers to engage with 25 of his works after the performance, the room hums with energy. His captions — wry, revealing, and philosophical — further the sense of intimacy with the work. (“In engineering, 1% wrong is 100% wrong. In art, even 99% wrong can still be 100% right. That’s a much better deal.”) The intensity of that engagement underscores something both exhilarating and sobering: people hunger for the real, even when they can’t always discern it when encountering a visual work of art. Both kinds of practice — the unfiltered and the refined — testify to the same truth: visual language in all its permutations has the power to make us feel alive.
And then there is Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterpiece of radical simplicity, revived at the Lyric Stage. When it first appeared, Wilder’s bare stage and self-aware narration shocked audiences accustomed to theatrical realism. Today, it feels almost prophetic. In a landscape of immersive technologies and overstimulation, Wilder’s stripped-down meditation on daily life and mortality feels like a cleansing breath.
The production’s restraint — its minimal set, direct address, and emotional clarity — becomes its strength. It reminds us that theater doesn’t need spectacle to hold power; it needs presence. The Stage Manager’s matter-of-fact omniscience, the unadorned portrayal of life in Grover’s Corners, the devastating simplicity of Emily’s return to the morning of her twelfth birthday — all cut straight through the noise. Our Town endures because it names the sacredness of the everyday without irony. Watching it now feels almost subversive: a declaration that what is real, simple, and mortal still matters.
Across these three works runs a shared current: an impatience with performance as disguise. Each artist — whether Grace, Kissajukian, or Wilder — strips theater back to its bones, leaving only a trembling testament to the human experience. And in doing so, they reclaim something we’re in danger of losing: the capacity to witness and be witnessed without mediation.
Perhaps that is what we hunger for now — not more novelty or spectacle, but sincerity. Not seamlessness, but fracture. Not algorithmic prediction, but the unpredictable pulse of someone telling their own story. In a world saturated with imitation, these performances feel like acts of reclamation. They remind us that the oldest technology of all — one person speaking to another — is still the most profound.
The audience, sitting in the dark, becomes part of that unspoken contract: to listen, to see, to feel, without the safety net of screens or edits. That is theater’s enduring power — and its defiance. It’s not pretending to be real. It is real.
And right now, that may be the most radical art form there is.
Sardines is at the Huntington Theater through November 16.
300 Paintings is at American Repertory Theater through October 25.
Our Town is at the Lyric Stage through October 19.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with my first born talking of the human-ness of every day living. Their comment was the human-mess of living, yes I liken to that depiction.
The palate cleansing of these plays is attractive to me.