Review: "But for the Grace"

Photos By David Roy

Once in a while, you stumble on a great piece of theater that makes you think and want to be part of a solution. "But for the Grace," a one-man show written by David Eliet about the plight of this country's hungry, now playing in the NY Fringe Festival, is such a show.

My official review of the show runs at American Theater Web http://americantheaterweb.info/, but the message of the show is so powerful, I felt it deserved a few more words here.
Eliet interviewed more than 100 clients, volunteers and staff at food pantries in Rhode Island and wrote the piece commissioned by the RI Community Food Bank to dispel false ideas about people who rely on food pantries to feed their families.


Actor Bob Jaffe portrays a wide range of characters, 11 in all, to tell the story. Their reflections are neatly woven with statistic about how hard it is for some to put food on the table. The hungry themselves are statistics, "Angelina DeFabrio, age 83, lives on a widows pension," Jaffe tells us as he piles client files on top of each other on the stage. "Natalie, age 23, manic depressive," he tells us as he piles garments representing "women at a food pantry."

As files, pictures and garments representing the hungry overwhelm the stage, you begin to get a sense of how big the problem really is. In fact, Jaffe spells it out, literally, for us on a white board.


"Rhonda works 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, and takes home about $400 each week, netting about $10 an hour," he tells us. "To pay her bills, Rhonda has to work 115 hours a month to pay her rent, 26 hours a month to pay gas and electric, eight hours a month for her medical co-pays, 12 hours a month to put gas in the car to get back and forth to work."

He shows us the white board with his computations.

"That adds up to 161 hours and she hasn't paid for food yet."

The show had its premiere at Trinity Rep in Providence. It plays the Fringe Aug. 14 at 9:45pm, Aug. 15 at 5:15pm and Aug. 17 at 2:30 pm at Walkerspace, 46 Walker Street, New York. For more information, visit www.fringenyc.org.

"But for the Grace" will be performed here in New England at the University of Rhode Island in North Kingstown on Sept. 13 and 14.

For more information about the show, email info@bftg.org.

But I Don't Have Time!

Time flies, or so the saying goes, and it never seems so evident as during the summer when in the blink of an eye, it's August and I always hear myself say, "What happened to July?"

The ephemeral quality of time was brought home to me recently when I was on deadline. At midnight, I decided I needed sleep and after a short rest, I intended to get up, finish the article and send it by the 7 am deadline. At 6:50am, I glanced at the clock, leapt out of bed and completed some of the fastest writing I've ever done. All the while, the clock in the lower right hand corner of my computer whirred away the minutes with a speed I didn't think possible. Life really is that short. The seconds are whizzing by.

Yet the bible is full of assurances that life is full of time. In fact, we have all the time in every day to accomplish everything necessary. It's only when we don't manage our time well, or when we add unnecessary tasks to our schedule that we start to feel as though we need God to add a few hours to the day.

A quick search for the word "time" in the bible brought an abundance of entries. Some phrases seemed to leap out at me:

• “in the course of time”
Sometimes we have to wait, but over time, God speaks or the answer becomes clear.
• “at that time”
We want the solution now, but there is an appointed time.
• “in the times of trouble”
We don’t want or like them, but troubled times are part of our journey. They’re not a surprise to God who provides instruction and comfort to help us go through them
• A number of times
Many references mention specific numbers of times like three times, or seven times, or seventy times seven times. Life is full of repeats. Solutions don’t always happen the first time.
• “at all times”
All kinds of times collide to make one giant timeline speeding by on the clocks of our computers. And God has an answer for that too. There’s a time for everything, so give it all to Him.

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

(Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8 NIV)