Adam Brace, a prolific British director known as an astute collaborator of stand-up comedians and other performers on a series of critically acclaimed one-person shows, one of which hits Broadway next month, died in London on April 29. He was 43.
Rebecca Fuller, his partner, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications from a stroke.
For more than a decade, Mr. Brace teamed up with more than a dozen comedians and actors, both emerging and established and most of them British, to create stage performances that were thematically and structurally more ambitious than conventional stand-up shows. sets, more in the tradition of shows with American monologues like Eric Bogosian, Colin Quinn and Mike Birbiglia.
Mr. Brace, who had once been a playwright, helped edit the shows with a refined ear for what the audience wanted.
“He provided so much more than the jokes and the laughs,” said American comedian Alex Edelman, whose show “Just for Us” premieres June 22 at the Hudson Theater after an Obie Award-winning run Off Broadway. . It was also performed in London and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the annual performing arts extravaganza. “He provided the intangibles that can make a good comedian a great comedian.”
Mr Edelman, who also worked with Mr Brace on two other one-man shows, added: “Comedians are maniacs, and he treated us in our roughest and most eccentric way. He would take these personal stories and translate them into accessible shows.
“Just for Us” tells the story of how Mr. Edelman, after attracting the attention of white nationalists online, a group of them decided to infiltrate Queens. It was praised last year by Laura Collins-Hughes in DailyExpertNews as “a lively, clever provocation of a monologue” on “race and identity in American culture.”
The impending move of Mr. Edelman’s show to Broadway follows several months after the opening in London’s West End of “One Woman Show,” Liz Kingsman’s theatrical parody of a playwright who decides to write and perform a confessional monologue. It was nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy and will premiere next month on Off Broadway, at the Greenwich House Theatre.
“With my show, he changed everything,” Ms Kingsman, an Australian-born actor and writer, said by phone. “It could have been a show that didn’t have much depth, but together we dove down and figured out everything underneath and everything we wanted to say with the best delivery method.”
She added: “I never wanted my show to be a soapbox thing, I never wanted it to sound like I was preaching, so it was about finding the format where we could make everything funny and digestible. “
For Mr. Brace, directing one-person comedy shows like Mrs. Kingsman’s was mostly about being a dramaturge, the literary editor of a play. He had that job at London’s Soho Theater before becoming assistant director.
“The term ‘director’ isn’t a useful or accurate term in comedy, but it’s one we’re stuck with right now,” he told The Stage, a British performing arts publication, in 2022. “Do something.”
“What we do,” he added, “shapes the whole event. It is hard-hitting dramaturgy and, at the most involved level, co-creation.”
Adam George Brace was born on March 25, 1980 in London. His father, George, an architect, was killed in a bicycle accident before Adam was born. His mother, Nicola (Sturdy) Brace, was a theater administrator. As a teenager, Adam filled envelopes with seasonal announcements from her theater and watched its productions.
His paternal grandmother nurtured his interest in theater by taking him to the Edinburgh Festival, which staged many of the shows he later directed.
After completing a bachelor’s degree in drama from the University of Kent in 2002, he taught English as a foreign language in South Korea and performed in a children’s theater in Kuala Lumpur. He also worked as a gardener, security guard and journalist at The Irish Post. In 2007 he received a master’s degree in writing for performance from Goldsmiths, University of London.
While studying for his master’s degree, he traveled to Amman, Jordan, where he researched what turned out to be his first full-length play, ‘Stovepipe’. The story of the recruitment of private British military contractors during the Iraq War and an ambush that killed one of them opened in England in 2008. The reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, writing of a 2009 production, said Mr Brace’s script has tense dialogue and reveals a sly sense of structure along the way.”
His next play, “They Drink It in the Congo” (2016), about a young white Londoner’s efforts to start a festival to celebrate Congolese culture and highlight the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo , was his last. , he had started directing one-person shows. He also worked as an associate at the Gate Theater in London from 2011 to 2013, as an associate dramaturge at Nuffield Southampton Theaters, from 2013 to 2016, and most recently at the Soho Theatre.
He also regularly collaborated with Sh!t Theatre, a theater company made up of Mrs. Fuller and Louise Mothersole, whose performance art incorporates music, comedy and multimedia elements.
“We called him our director,” Ms. Fuller, who acts under the name Rebecca Biscuit, said over the phone. “He helped you see connections in things that weren’t visible.”
In addition to Mrs. Fuller, Mr. Brace is survived by his mother; his brothers, Tim and Alex Hopkins; and his stepfather, Nigel Hopkins.
Mr Edelman said that after a show, he and Mr Brace would assess how well he had executed various objectives, including whether he had struck the right balance between stillness and momentum.
With Mr. Brace’s death, he said, “One of the things on my mind is, who’s going to be the person to talk to me about that execution?”