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Spalding Gray is living proof that you don't have to be crazy
to be a good artist. He's been there and back, and he's better
than ever. Gray has been a fixture on the Soho arts scene
since 1979 when he catapulted out of the Wooster Group (then
called the Performance Group) into a solo career, performing
autobiographical monologues at once comic and scary.
Witnessing his confessions was like watching someone unravel
in public -- this guy was clearly on the edge, barely masking
his inner turbulence with the polished demeanor of a veteran
performer. But five years of honing his monologues before
audiences in Soho and on tour have transformed him from a
borderline urban victim into an underground celebrity, and now
he's on the verge of something more than cult acclaim. Two
videotapes about him will premiere at the Kitchen on Sunday,
November 11 -- Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's Spalding Gray's
Map of L.A., shot while he was performing in the Olympic
Arts Festival's "Carplays" series with Marshal Efron
and Mary Woronov, and Renee Shafransky's Gray Areas, a
documentary of his recent tour of Grange halls and
senior-citizen drop-in centers throughout New England. And he
makes his film debut in The Killing Fields, Roland
Joffe's staggering portrait of the friendship between two
journalists during the fall of Cambodia.
Gray has a small part in the movie, playing the assistant to
the American ambassador at the time of the evacuation of Phnom
Penh in 1975. But the experience of spending two months in
Thailand, hobnobbing with famous actors and journalists while
recreating one of the most horrifying bloodbaths in recent
history, becomes the basis of Gray's ninth and most ambitious
monologue, the two-part Swimming to Cambodia, which
opens this week at the Performing Garage.
From the beginning, Gray's monologues drew inspiration from
such intensely personal artistic endeavors as Yvonne Rainer's
filmed journals and the confessional journalism associated
with "The Me Decade," but they went beyond the
merely personal and confessional in self-exposure. Three
Places in Rhode Island, the Wooster/Performance Group's
trilogy of multimedia theater pieces composed over a period of
four years by Gray with Elizabeth LeCompte was based on
Spalding's WASP upbringing. The middle section, Rumstick
Road, explicitly evoked his mother who, after her first
nervous breakdown, had a vision of Christ, became a Christian
Scientist, and, after her second breakdown, committed suicide
in 1967. The monologues sprang from a clinical self-vigilance
compounded by an extreme case of actor's narcissism. The first
two, Sex and Death to the Age 14 and Booze, Cars,
and College Girls, were much less harrowing than the Rhode
Island trilogy, partly because they dealt with childhood
experiences that anyone could relate to, and partly because
Gray was such a delightful performer: disarming in his candor,
self-mocking in his humor, thrillingly precise in his timing
and choice of detail -- qualities that characterize his work
to this day.
It wasn't until his third monologue, India (and After),
a fractured free-association on his own nervous collapse after
touring India with the Performance Group's Mother Courage
in 1976, that the root of Gray's compulsion to confess himself
in front of an audience became clear. Part of his desperation
was shared with an entire generation of young Americans who
rejected their middle-class background in the '60s,
participated in the life and death of the counterculture, and
finally internalized the post-Watergate national trauma: they
felt stranded in history, alienated, lacking any sense of
collective or individual identity. That common malaise,
sharpened by Spalding Gray's specific terror of following his
mother's example, of simply disappearing into his own lack of
faith in the world, found expression and balm in the
"talking cure" in which he dispelled his fears by
admitting them before witnesses.
If the early monologues succeeded in keeping Gray from
pitching himself into the abyss he circled so precariously,
they also bolstered his ego by drawing the kind of personal
following rarely seen in avant-garde circles. There was an
undeniably impressive aesthetic foundation to the work. Unlike
his colleagues in the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, whose
experimentation took them further into high-tech performance,
Gray reclaimed the ancient art of storytelling, simply sitting
at a desk and addressing an attentive audience in the intimacy
of the Performing Garage. Even so, his new few monologues,
including A Personal History of the American Theater,
Nobody Ever Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk, and 47 Beds,
were clearly crowd-pleasers -- up-to-the-minute topical,
brimming with hilarious stories, downright titillating in
their candor (Spalding in a sensory deprivation tank, Spalding
having a homosexual experience in Greece).
As the confidence of being an esteemed solo performer -- a
(gasp) popular entertainer -- replaced the genuine grappling
for a sense of self that originally sparked Gray's public
autobiography, his monologues were beginning to describe
experiences less buried in the past. And because he had
nothing to hide behind -- no script, no characters, no
philosophy like the credo of style espoused by Quentin Crisp,
who strikes me as the performer most comparable to Spalding
Gray -- even he began to feel he was using himself up
at a dangerously rapid pace. When Aperture magazine
commissioned him to accompany photographer Randal Levenson to
the 1981 Tennessee State Fair, the resulting monologue In
Search of the Monkey Girl (later published), proved Gray
to be an excellent reporter in his combination of sympathy and
mania for details. His unhesitating identification with
carnies and sideshow freaks stripped the prose of
squeamishness, sentimentality, or sensationalism; for a
moment, he made you contemplate the tranquil domesticity of
Emmett the Alligator Man and Priscilla the Monkey girl rather
than viewing them as nature's mistakes. Even his confessional
monologues reveal Spalding as the kind of guy who converses
with the craziest street people in Washington Square as
kindred spirits, who doesn't ask questions when a carful of
Chassids mistakes him for a Bowery bum on Sunday morning and
whisks him off to Brooklyn to rake leaves for ten bucks and a
beer.
Gray's energetic curiosity (an ingrained form of actor
research, maybe) was the key to Interviewing the Audience,
which he began performing in 1982 and has toured the country
with ever since, drawing others into his philosophical
obsessions (is there a heaven? does true love exist?) and
imparting to unbelievers the rewards of the examined life.
During that time, he channeled his confessional impulses into
quasi-autobiographical writing. He had never written his
monologues beforehand but performed them from an outline of
key words and phrases. Taking time out to work on his prose
(at Edward Albee's writers' workshop in Montauk, among other
places) introduced Gray to the joys of structural thinking
he'd always appreciated in a director like Liz LeCompte but
had avoided as an intuitive performer.
Still, writing in solitude and interviewing other people don't
stir the blood like making an audience laugh. Spalding was
really getting itchy to perform, even act in other people's
work for the first time in years, when The Killing Fields
came along. The film was perfect grist for a monologue, and Swimming
to Cambodia exercises all of Spalding Gray's muscles -- as
a writer, reporter, and performer.
Sitting down at his desk in front of a map of Southeast Asia,
wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans, he begins,
"Saturday, June 18, 1983, Hua Hin, Gulf of
Thailand." His girlfriend Renee is visiting the set of The
Killing Fields for two weeks, expecting Spalding to come
back with her to their summer house upstate in Krumville, but
Spalding wants to stay because he hasn't had a "perfect
moment" in Thailand yet, so Renee insists, "Either
you marry me or give me a date when you're returning!"
From there, Gray zigzags through his far-flung adventures with
the speed and agility of an Indy 500 driver on the San Diego
Freeway. How he got the role turns into a capsule history of
the war in Cambodia (from Prince Sihanouk to Pol Pot, with
stops at Operation Breakfast and Kent State). Bangkok is not
just the place where Thomas Merton stepped out of the bathtub
and got electrocuted by an electric fan, "which Judith
Malina says was a CIA plot," but it's also the center of
a thriving sex industry featuring live shows in which
"women do everything with their vaginas except have
babies." A scene of helicopters evacuating Phnom Penh
filmed in Camp Pendleton, where the crew members wore T-shirts
saying "Skip the dialogue, let's blow something up,"
swoops to the real evacuation of Phnom Penh and the slaughter
of somewhere between one and three million Cambodians
according to the Khmer Rouge doctrine "Better kill an
innocent person than leave an enemy alive." Shooting 66
takes until three in the morning to get four lines right,
Spalding wonders why he feels so exhausted, and understands,
for a moment, what killed Marilyn Monroe.
And that's just part one.
On its own modest scale, Swimming to Cambodia is as
compelling a piece of work as The Killing Fields.
Because he was on the fringes of the movie, Gray's
Mailer-as-Ishmael account fills in many historical and
on-the-scene details the movie leaves unexplained or
undigested. And his carefully developed expertise at narrative
compression and well-paced storytelling renders a multilayered
historical event comprehensible in the context of one man's
day. None of the research cribbed from William Shawcross's Sideshow
pinpoints the clash of barbarism and civilization more vividly
than an anecdote about feuding with upstairs neighbors who
play their stereo too loud; a chance meeting with a coked-up
sailor stationed on a nuclear submarine confirms our most
paranoids dreams about military insanity.
The second part of the new work subordinates
Spalding-Gray-the- reporter to the Spalding Gray familiar from
earlier monologues, whom the artist describes as "a
combination of Huck Finn and Candide -- the kind of naive,
open, slightly paranoid, often horny searcher." Along
with ruthlessly candid tales of his ever-adolescent
pleasure-seeking and clumsy, even callous dealings with women,
Gray ponders the future of his career. While the aftermath of
Cambodia meant a Pulitzer Prize and big movie sale for
Sydney Schanberg, Spalding's rewards are more modestly and
predictably self-deflating. As he says in the monologue, he
got an agent, tried out for The Karate Kid and Hill
Street Blues, and went to the wire with Dick Shawn for the
role of Patty Duke's husband in Hail to the Chief, a
new TV sitcom about the first woman president.
Offstage and on, Gray is as ambivalent about his
"career" as he is about getting married and raising
a family. He'd like to parlay his reputation as a comic
performer into stage and (especially) film roles, but nothing
is more satisfying -- or, when it comes down to it, more
necessary -- than his own work. When he could have been out on
the Coast meeting and greeting himself into guest shots on St.
Elsewhere, he was visiting paper mills and boarding
schools in rural Massachusetts trying to coax regular people
into seeing their own lives as a history worth putting into
words. Judging from the video Gray Areas, as well as
the monologue Travels Through New England (which
premiered last month at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge), the
tour was something of a bust. Questions to the audience about
love and sex got one-word answers, wile religion and politics
were strictly off-limits. For these tight-lipped New
Englanders, Gray laments, "There is no history, only
television."
But for me that kind of response to Interviewing the
Audience further emphasizes the formidable craft involved.
Observing life-as-it-is- being-lived isn't as easy as Gray
makes it look. Moreover the difficult others have attesting to
their own experience underscores the moral dimension of Gray's
self-exploration. At a time when mass media and the microchip
efficiently plot the ultimate devaluation of idiosyncratic
humanity, there's something exemplary, even radical, about
promoting the art of paying attention to every little thing.
His clinical desperation may be under control, but there's
still a doomsday feeling to Spalding Gray's work that insists
there's no time left for anything less than total honesty. Our
history is now, and you don't have to be crazy to say so.
The Village Voice, November 13, 1984
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