Opinion | Keeping a Light on After Loss

Imagine: You make something with someone you love. It’s a thing that’s tangible but needs participation, like a watch that requires winding. Now imagine that person goes away, and you still have to tend the garden you planted with him, or sing the song you wrote together or walk through a house that is now fully characterized by its emptiness. Many people, I know, don’t have to imagine.

It’s strange math. The loss of a collaborator feels like the most present thing.

My closest friend, Adam Brace, and I started building something in 2018. It began when we sat down at a hotel bar in London and I tried to make him laugh. Adam had directed all of my solo shows, a process that always began with our trying to cobble together something more cohesive from the observational and anecdotal fragments I’d been building onstage in comedy clubs. I’d lob anecdotes and observations, and he’d offer argument and provocation and, occasionally, unleash a guffaw that meant I had something.

That night in London, an hour and a few ciders in, I told Adam about a meeting of white nationalists I had attended in Queens a month before. Adam chuckled through the retelling, familiar with Judaism and my neuroses. Two days later, the story of that infiltration gone sideways was the backbone of a show called “Just for Us.”

We developed it over three years in any venue that would have it — pubs in Northern England, comedy clubs in the American Southwest, shoe-box Greek cultural centers in Australia. When Adam couldn’t be there, I’d send him recordings. He’d point out things most comedians would never think about, like where the show should find stillness and when a longer joke slowed the narrative’s momentum. Adam thought that solo shows should answer the question: What is our place in the world? I looked after the jokes, and he looked after that.

The show finally arrived at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village and after a few nights, New York audiences found it. Three weeks at Cherry Lane turned into a year and a half as the show climbed the ladder to nicer and nicer theaters in other cities. An amused Adam flew over from his home in England to sleep on my couch and help restage it every time we opened in a new venue. Finally and improbably, in the spring of 2023, we found out the show would move to the Hudson Theater. It would be the Broadway debut for both of us.

Less than two months later, suddenly and very inconsiderately, given his numerous theatrical responsibilities, Adam died. He was 43 years old.