To Free a Mockingbird – 12 May 2025

To Free a Mockingbird creator and performer Grace Aki delivers a funny, dark, and twisted solo performance at Soho Playhouse. The story works its way through Aki‘s family history, but stops short of explaining why these stories have relevance to the audience. Her performance is moving – to both laughter and tears, but at the end, I left a little puzzled as to what everything I watched was supposed to mean in terms of takeaways.

The show began with a moderately embraced crowd work that occurred sporadically throughout the performance. At the onset, Aki was cheerful, speaking very fast, and a little over enthusiastic about being in front of an audience. She made the logical step of transitioning to tell the audience, a little bit about herself and her heritage. This “bit” turned out to be the entire show. She never properly introduced the concept of the show in its actual text, and at the conclusion I had absolutely no idea what the Gestalt of the show was supposed to convey. Grace Aki told me her family history, but left out the transition to why an audience should care – what was relevant about this story such that it belongs on stage.

When Aki made the shift from happy-go-lucky to intensely sad, she slowed down enough for her words to make impactful statements. At the end, she let her eulogy for her father play on a speaker on a stool without her on stage as the lights faded out. By blackout, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But then, that was it. Aki came out to bow. She didn’t tell us why she was telling the story to an audience. She didn’t wrap it up with a conclusion, lesson, or moral. Every word we’d been avidly hanging on to waiting to see where this journey would lead was just a word. The audience wasn’t invited in to process, and there was no cohesive through line binding it together.

To Free a Mockingbird has great acting and Grace Aki is certainly engaging on stage. The transitions need some work in order for the story to conclude in a meaningful, powerful way that lingers with the audience in its relevance. It’s 90% there but unfortunately, missing some vital structural elements that would make the audience care, not just laugh and cry. The biggest tell that it needs structural work is that I don’t know what it was about thematically. It felt like a performer telling us who her parents and grandparents were, concluding that they were people she’d miss. But she never explicitly said anything about time being precious, learning that her predecessors were good people, etc. In brief summary, her family members lived and died, and death is sad. Give me more. Aki has impressive stage presence and I know she has more to give in terms of dramatic structure. The short anecdotes work really well— all To Free a Mockingbird needs to soar is some substance to tie it all together.

I attended this performance on a press pass from DARR Publicity.