|
In the last few years, Spalding Gray's explicitly
autobiographical work has placed him in the forefront of
contemporary experimental theater -- though he is little
known, and rarely performs, outside New York. India &
After (America), which Gray will present Saturday, March
15, at the Boston Film/Video Foundation, is one of a series of
monologues called 3 x Gray -- the others are Sex and
Death to the Age 14 and Booze, Cars, and College girls
-- which simply recount incidents from various stages of his
life, a life unusual only in its having been so thoroughly
examined. These monologues grew out of a trilogy of more
elaborate but equally personal theater pieces called Three
Places in Rhode Island, created over a period of four
years in collaboration with director Elizabeth LeCompte and a
company of actors who, like Gray and LeCompte, are veterans of
Richard Schechner's Performance Group. Like 3 x Gray, Three
Places surveys Gray's childhood, adolescence, and
maturity, focusing on vivid and often comic details, both
mundane and profound -- the most profound being those relating
to his mother's suicide in 1967. In each of these pieces, Gray
serves as both the actor and the material, dealing directly
and overtly with the kind of autobiographical concerns that
even related avant-garde artists like Meredith Monk, Robert
Wilson, and Richard Foreman feel compelled to disguise or make
oblique. "This is as big and important a current in the
art of acting as was the development of motivational
technique, and the notion of the Brechtian or 'epic'
performance," Lee Breuer, director of the experimental
theater troupe Mabou Mines, has declared. "In other
words, this is the third new idea about acting in this
century."
Gray acknowledges that the impulse for his personal theater
came from his work with Schechner. Schechner propounded a
theory of acting in which the performer remains himself or
herself at all times, while doing series of actions
associated with a character -- instead of becoming the
character. Schechner's equal emphasis on text and actor made
him unpopular with playwrights and critics, but many actors,
including Gray, found the approach liberating. Ironically,
this freedom led Gray to question the idea of playing a role
-- a fictional character -- at all. Stepping away from the
Performance Group, he began experimenting with a process of
free association, using props and improvising with other
actors, which led to the creation of Sakonnet Point, an
almost wordless evocation of his childhood, which became the
first section of Three Places in Rhode Island. Gray
found that by incorporating the reactions of the other actors,
and by allowing LeCompte to edit the work and provide a visual
framework for it, he was able to transform personal material
into art without descending into self-indulgent
confessionalism. The Gray-LeCompte trilogy began as an
experiment. But its careful exploration of volatile emotional
issues (suicide, madness, religion, family, art) and its
imaginative use of film, dance, music, child actors, and
non-linear texts made it one of the most impressive and
innovative theater events of the '70s.
Just as Gray left Schechner's Performance Group because he
felt uncomfortable playing roles, he switched from
collaborating to performing solo in an effort to be "more
expressive" -- though this step didn't present itself
automatically. "When I was in Santa Cruz teaching at the
University of California in the summer of 1978," said
Gray when I spoke to him recently at the Soho loft he shares
with LeCompte, "I took a course in the philosophy of
emotions with a woman from Princeton. We became very close and
took long walks and talked often about my work. I'd done these
very personal pieces, and I didn't know where to go next; plus
I had this chronic feeling of impending nuclear destruction.
She suggested the way to deal with my doomsday feelings was to
remember that the most creative people who were still
operating when Rome was going under were the chroniclers. That
rang a lot of bells in me. I wanted to chronicle what I deeply
felt was the decline of the white middle-class world as we'd
know it. To write it down would be presuming there was a
history that would survive on the printed page, so I wanted to
do something immediate. I thought I'd take a period of my life
and recount it as simply as possible before an audience.
That's how Sex and Death to the Age 14 began.
"I began to
realize," Gray continued, "that I was questioning
the whole reason for metaphor in my life. We worked so heavily
on metaphor in Three Places to somehow uplift the work
and take it beyond the self-indulgent state, to make it into
Art. But what would happen if I simply reported a series of
events that I remembered? So I sat down and did this thing,
and it was about 45 minutes long. Each night new material
would come to me through memory, through my imaginative film
of the past, through free association -- this was, of course,
the psychoanalytic process. I'd been interested in
psychoanalysis for years, in the idea that one is simply
reconstructing the puzzle of one's life in front of another
person, and that person gives one permission to verbally
recreate a whole new world and to accept that world. But I
trusted the performance process more because I had a community
of people -- anywhere from 30 to 150 -- to share the
experience rather than one psychoanalyst. Actually, it was
reverse psychoanalysis: the audience would be my witness and
pay."
The way Gray vacillates between professorial earnestness and
deadpan humor is charming, and charm is an incalculably
valuable dynamic in his performance. In Sex and Death
and Booze, etc., for example, Gray sits down behind a
small desk and begins to spin out a series of off-handed
anecdotes, skipping from one to the next without regard for
chronology or coherence. His manner is composed and friendly;
he knows what might be funny but doesn't lean on one-liners or
overplay big scenes. His unfaltering matter-of-factness makes
him an expert raconteur; the individual stories may
seem roundabout and unrelated, but when he's done, Gray has
mapped out, with surprisingly clarity, an entire personal
landscape. His reminiscences of funerals for pets and his
mother's method of scrubbing his infant foreskin or his tales
of borderline-alcoholic antics make these pieces memorable and
frequently uproarious, almost too uproarious to suit Gray.
"A funny thing happened after a while, which I am still
conflicted about. The performer in me took over and began to
edit and play these pieces. I felt I was pandering to the
audience; I'd learned to manipulate their responses. At this
point I'd rather print them up and publish them rather than do
them over and over."
India & After (America) is quite different from the
other two monologues in form, content, and relationship to the
audience. It deals not with the halcyon days of youth but with
the period during which Gray traveled to India with the
Performance Group, stayed on to study with a guru, returned to
the States, and suffered a nervous breakdown partly induced by
a previously-undiagnosed hypoglycemia. Most intriguingly,
Gray's recollections are structured from the outside; an
actress named Meghan Ellenberger sits nearby, picks words at
random out of a dictionary, and gives Gray a time limit within
which to free associate. "I found with Sex and Death
that, because of the distance on that age, the memory came in
cut-up time. But I couldn't figure out how to get India
& After into that form. When I first did it, it was
one long boring travelogue -- boring for me -- with all these
psychological bridges: 'I did this because that; in case you
didn't know what this is, it's that.' Too many footnotes. I
knew I had to break it up somehow, and when I tried the
dictionary thing, it became this huge puzzle finally put
together by dovetailing of time and place and story. One story
would be cut off by the time limitation, and the audience
would go, 'Ohhh' -- it'd be like a cliffhanger. As the time
went on, the pieces would begin to come together in the
audience's head...That's the most interesting piece for me now
because of the chance element. I don't know what's going to
come out each time, so I can play it over and over. It's like
throwing the I Ching."
For the foreseeable future, Gray (who is 38) plans to continue
his public autobiography. One upcoming project, called A
Personal History of the American Theater, is a running
commentary on all the plays Gray has been in since he
graduated from Emerson College; they range hilariously from
the Open Theater's Terminal to a summer stock Under
the Yum Yum Tree. Some reviewers have speculated that such
intensely personal work may damage Gray by making it
impossible for him to relate intimately except with a crowd. I
mentioned this to him and jokingly imagined an audience
hovering over his loft to watch him eat dinner or make love.
"That's an idea for another piece that I haven't gotten
to yet," he said quite seriously, gesturing to indicate a
tentative arrangement. "I would have 20 people at this
end, and I would go through what I do in the course of a
morning, juxtaposed with some tapes of my father talking about
what he does." What, I wondered, would this mean?
"What energizes my life and my performance," he
explained, "is that certain memories need to be told over
and over until they don't need to be told anymore. If I'm out
in New York City in the course of a day, I've got to find
somebody -- Liz or someone -- to come back and report certain
incidents to. If I don't report them, I feel stifled and
claustrophobic and neurotic. Beyond that, I don't analyze it.
The need is to tell a story. The audience perceives that
need."
Exposing one's life so relentlessly in the theater might be
assumed to reflect a monstrous egotism, but Gray seems more
self-effacing than self-obsessed. "I don't have a strong
concept of self," he admitted. "I do feel myself to
be an onion. I keep peeling and peeling. One thing I realized
is that I was an actor before I chose to be an actor. I was
always circling around the outside, and that kind of 'I alone
have escaped to tell you' became my signature as an actor. I
think it comes out of my terrific fear of death. I'm trying to
create my own world in which I am dying all the time and
returning from the dead for the Last Judgment. All Christians
have this fantasy that the supreme moment will be that last
judgment with God. When I gave up the idea of religion, I had
to make my audience God, and the last judgment becomes all the
time."
Boston Phoenix, March 1980
|
