TERMINAL MADNESS
Terminal Madness is a two-part evening consisting first of a film, Trust Me, and then of a live performance, Terminal Madness. Trust Me, the filmed adaptation of one of Grisby’s earlier performance pieces, The Appurtenances Attached Hereto, is a 17-minute miracle. Directed with consummate clarity and precision by Tom Finerty, Trust Me presents Grigsby in a wild array of surreal costumes, ruminating upon his uncertain relationship with the future. Dressed as a carnival barker, he tries to convince a hall full of bingo-playing women in outlandish hats that he can teach them how to predict the future. Later Grigsby is dressed in light blue unisex underwear, writhing uncomfortably against a luminous white wall; he laments to an absent Dr. Ruth that as a 37-year-old woman, he is washed up. “My breasts hang uselessly,” he says. “What can the future hold for me?”
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The web that Grigsby and Finerty weave in this film is dizzyingly complex. The haunting, funky music, by Grigsby and Don Hedeker, adds to the film’s spell. Visual, musical, and textual themes appear and disappear until it becomes impossible to get one’s bearings. Is Grigsby supposed to be the same character throughout? When he describes a plane crash in the beginning of the film, is it the same crash alluded to two other times? Are all of these vignettes occurring at the same time, or are they perhaps separated by years?
Given the constant and often hallucinogenic movement in Trust Me, Grigsby intelligently follows it with a live performance based on stasis. Grigsby, dressed in a wildly patterned black-and-white suit and walking on two-foot stilts, finds himself wandering about in a black-and-white cartoon garden (designed by David Csicsko). Confined to this lonely arena, the oddly proportioned figure clutches his Golden Treasury of World Knowledge. He is constantly attempting to get an overview–which is why, he admits, he decided to be taller in the first place.
In fact his great skill as a performer made me a bit frustrated by his use of the stage. While his meandering made sense in context, I longed to see him use that meandering to a greater end, or at least to allow the quality of the meandering to evolve with the piece. Some of the time I felt he was wandering about the stage because he had nothing else to do and needed to put a space between segments. As a result, the segments all had equal weight, and the piece didn’t gather much momentum. But then, that sameness seemed an apt theatrical expression of the kind of flatness being explored.
