TRUST ME
This story encapsulates Brown’s simple but wholly effective approach in Trust Me. While he spends some time poking at death, he’s more attentive to life’s directive to open one’s eyes and look. Fortunately for us, his vision is crystal clear: equipped with a keen wit, an expressive physical grace, and a seemingly endless capacity for empathy, he weaves life’s insignificant details into a colorful fabric at once dazzling and familiar, containing moments of great human drama.
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Trust Me is a series of scenes centered around a family’s last barbecue of the summer. As in any family gathering, conversation ranges from the banal–reliving a walk through the new mall–to the bizarre: “Hey! Anyone going across the street to catch golf balls with Robert has got to wear a helmet!” Interactions may be innocent (Grandma searching for a picture of a guardian angel for her granddaughter), troubling (a kid defending his tree fort by saying, “No gays in the tree!”), or touching (a father telling his HIV-positive son, “You’ve got our house if you need it”).
But Brown knows these characters inside and out, seeing as accurately through the eyes of a 4-year-old girl as through the eyes of a 40-year-old tax attorney. Yet paradoxically only slight differentiations in voice and physicality are necessary to separate the characters: Brown goes for the essence of each person, allowing the audience to fill in the details.
