Crawlspace: a true crime musical

www.crawlspacemusical.com​

Crawlspace premiered with a series of performances by the Tech Players of Tennessee Tech University under the direction of Mark Creter. The show later received a workshop and two staged readings by the Ensemble Theatre of Chattanooga, which also produced its second full production in December 2023.

Years after interviewing accused serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Dr. Judy Matthewson remains haunted by the case. As a forensic psychologist, she’s spent her career searching for the causes of violence and abuse in the brain. She’s sifted through the dark corners of human depravity with scientific detachment. But to her, John’s story is different. It's an abyss she can’t cross. The Doctor believes this old case still holds secrets and answers buried in its wreckage. 

Convinced she missed something during her interviews with John, she reopens the case in her mind. What follows is a fever dream of childhood trauma, fractured personalities, psychological manipulation, haunting duality, monstrous acts, distorted narratives, blurred perspectives, and overlapping memories. 

John’s story conjures images of his childhood, adult life, murders, and arrest, blurring reality and a troubled psyche. John embodies contradiction. He’s a family man, community leader, outgoing neighbor, and part-time clown. He’s also a violent criminal and unreliable narrator who claims to have multiple personality disorder (DID in today’s terminology). Answers don’t come easily, and John has ulterior motives. 

As the Doctor digs deeper, John’s tale begins to resonate unexpectedly with long-buried trauma from her past, experiences she had carefully compartmentalized in the name of scientific objectivity. Her internal defenses start to collapse, and she becomes both investigator and subject. The exposure to John’s twisted tale forces her to face her own ghosts. 

Crawlspace is not procedural; it is a reckoning. It is a mind-bending descent into the hidden recesses of the human mind, an exploration of the enigmatic edges of sanity, the dangers of detachment, and the risks of obsession. It is a repurposing of the true crime story that transcends the genre, a meditation on the legacies of trauma that echo through time. It is a descent into the void, where the search for light may be the only hope for healing.

*Read Jason's interview with Judge Sam Amirante, Gacy's original defense attorney, on the "blog" section of this site or by following this link: Interview