UPDATE: One more show added to Malcolm Grissom’s run, at 8 p.m. Saturday August 26th.

By Paul Horsley

Since its beginnings in 2004 the KC Fringe Festival, which continues to grow like Topsy each year, has prided itself on an incredibly wide range of offerings: from theater to dance, comedy to puppetry, burlesque to world music, performance art to film, visual arts to programs for kids and youth. It’s not uncommon for the Festival—which has expanded from 30 events a decade ago to some 100 this year—to find many of its presentations tough to categorize. And that’s okay. Among this year’s offerings, few are more difficult to pigeonhole than “Can’t Ain’t Nothing But a Four-Letter Word” featuring the funny, poignant work of San Francisco-based actor-comedian-storyteller Malcolm Grissom.

Part one-man theatrical performance, part standup comedy, part storytelling in the griot tradition, this candid self-confessional piece has been making the rounds of festivals and comedy shows nationwide, and Kansas Citians are lucky to get to see it beginning July 18th at the Westport Flea Market. “My show does have some standup elements to it,” he says, “though it’s closer to storytelling and theater. … It falls into a bunch of different categories. … Even as a performing-arts piece, it’s still a comedy.”

There are two aspects of Malcolm that you might not immediately recognize—that he is disabled, and that he is black. And he has deftly woven people’s confusion about these things into his comedy. “You can’t be black!” people tell him. “You can’t be disabled! You don’t have a cane … or a drool cup!” Yet the truth about his disability is pretty sobering: As a child Malcolm developed Reye’s Syndrome, and its effects were devastating. It took years of truly grueling therapy to relearn everything: motor skills, speech, even thought processes. “Throughout the years my brain has found ways to heal itself. … The brain is amazing. It can definitely rework itself to be able to function.” That his humor touches on this can be disconcerting for audiences. “When I’m in a theater setting, especially, I find that some people aren’t sure whether to laugh or not.” For that reason he always starts informally, with gentle banter to loosen people up. “I find by doing that people are more apt to laugh, to be more relaxed.”

People’s confusion about his racial background is also a source of comedy for Malcolm. Yes he’s part African American, but in the variegated racial mix of Hawaii’s Big Island no one really noticed. “Race was never an issue in Hawaii,” he says. “And even when I go back, I just blend in.” It was not until he settled in California that he experienced racism for the first time. “I’m a black Hawaiian … like Obama,” he says in his show. None of that took the edge off the stereotyping, he says. “Having Obama in the limelight is not really going to help,” he says. “They’re still going to have their prejudgments.”

Malcolm’s comedy comes with a higher purpose: Not just to raise awareness about race or about the mysterious and often tragic effects of Reye’s, but to inspire anyone who faces obstacles. “It doesn’t have to be racism or disabilities: There are many, many different obstacles,” he says. From earliest childhood Malcolm loved theater (inspired by his mother, an actress), and it took superhuman effort to go from paralysis to performing onstage again—to being that kid who could make people laugh. “I was funny before the illness,” he says, “and it took a long time after the illness for me to find a way back to that. But that is what the show is about: finding your way back to your ‘song,’ to what drives you.”

Malcolm Grissom appears at Westport Flea Market July 18th through the 26th.

For information and tickets for this or any other KC Fringe Festival program see their ingenious website at kcfringe.org.

To reach Paul Horsley send email to phorsley@sbcglobal.net or find him on Facebook or Twitter (@phorsleycritic).

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