The Fainting Game (And Other Stories) — gripp
The Fainting Game (and Other Stories) by Marshall "gripp" Gillson (2021) Award-winning writer, performer, and filmmaker Marshall "gripp" Gillson presents their first collection of shorts with The Fainting Game (and Other Stories). After spending a decade earning accolades as a spoken word artist, this collection offers the author's perspective in a new format: closet screenplays.
The scripts, written to be enjoyed on the page and in the mind rather than onscreen, explore the influence of racial capitalism on art, notions of self in the digital age, juvenile depression, and the surreal experience of an antinormative life. Characters in six short scripts invite readers to discover the magical in the worlds of their stories, and in turn the wonder in our own.
gripp is a writer / programmer / producer based primarily on the internet. They graduated from Morehouse College in 2009 and the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012 with degrees in Computer Science. Their work is multimedia and interdisciplinary, ranging from written word to performance art to electronic installation. They have appeared onstage as an actor and a poet, self-published and been printed in literary magazines, built digital chapbooks and chatbots, taught college courses and workshops, and have written, produced, and appeared in short films. gripp's original television pilot Offbeat / But On Point won the 2020 Table Read My Screenplay competition and was produced and broadcast as a table read. In 2019, Marshall co-wrote and -produced the grant-funded stageplay SPIRIT, which premiered to a three-show run in October. gripp was recognized by the 2019 Roxbury International Film Festival with the Kay Bourne Emerging Filmmaker award after their short film Shyla premiered at the festival. gripp debuted the role of Nathanael Grene in AS220s 2017 production of A Furtive Movement: the Use of Farce. Marshall is also a nationally acclaimed spoken word performer and appeared on the National Poetry Slam final stage twice in adjacent years. Much of gripp's work is fantastical, surreal, and absurdist. It confronts race, gender, mental imbalance, loneliness, existential dread, and sometimes robots. In their spare time, they enjoy board games, avoiding attention, and writing biographies in the third person.
