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Quentin Crisp is a 70-year-old British eccentric with a name
like an Evelyn Waugh character or an American breakfast
cereal. His conversation distills thoughts into Oscar Wildean
epigrams. Refusing to conform to a society in which he always
felt alien, he has become, he says, "one of the stately
homos of England." Spalding Gray is a 37-year-old New
York actor. He grew up in Rhode Island, the middle son of a
WASP family rich enough to have a summer place. He has worked
in the theater since he was a teenager and has for several
years been a member of Richard Schechner's experimental
Performance Group. These two very different men are, in very
different ways, engaged in the process of putting their life
stories onstage -- making blatantly autobiographical theater.
Of course, most modern art emanates from an autobiographical
impulse. Yet, in even the most obvious examples -- such as
John Updike's tales of the Maple family, Frank O'Hara's
"I-do-this-I-do-that" poems, Tennessee Williams's
incessant re-creation of monster mothers and pure but damaged
girls -- self-portraiture is hidden behind characters, themes,
invented plots. This way, the author's personal history can be
used and re-used in endless variations, through an entire
career. The peculiar thing about An Evening with Quentin
Crisp, at New York's Players Theater Off Broadway, and Nayatt
School, at the off Off Broadway Performing Garage, is that
there is no pretense of disguising raw autobiographical
materials as something else. It is even misleading to say that
Crisp and Gray "play" themselves. They are themselves.
An Evening with Quentin Crisp is not a play, nor is it
theater in the strictest sense. It is structured like a
lecture -- Crisp discourses for about an hour, then, after an
intermission ("a pause and a good cry"), he takes
questions from the audience. Practically speaking, An
Evening is a promotional event meant to gauge interest in
a musical version of Crisp's autobiography The Naked Civil
Servant, which was written in 1968 and made into a British
television play (starring John Hurt) in 1976. Its success has
made this curious creature famous. Crisp had already made
himself moderately notorious by parading through the streets
of London in garish makeup, hennaed hair and high-heeled
shoes, "not merely a self-confessed homosexual but a
self-evident one." Most of his life has been a crusade to
persuade a dubious public that "effeminacy exists in
people who are in all other respects just like home." His
book describes this outrageous, sometimes dangerous mission,
and his show tells how he gave it style.
Style is a religion Crisp preaches with evangelical fervor. He
defines it thus: start with your identity, a combination of
your assets and what your friends mean when they discuss
"the trouble with you"; polish that, and you have
style. Style, Crisp says, is learning to do deliberately what
one formerly did by mistake. This sounds like an entirely
frivolous conceit, but Crisp is perfectly serious when he
contends that we have too much freedom and that television,
advertising, and affluence distract us from finding out who we
really are. And, when he dismisses Russia as "a land
without lipstick," there is a certain perspicacity
beneath the camp witticism.
One's first response to Crisp's rap is to stand aloof and
laugh, to chalk it all up to delusion, to dismiss him as
foolish; applying his ridiculous philosophy would seem to mean
spending one's life primping like a vain movie star. But some
of what he proposes makes sense. The message is as scary as it
is simple: be yourself. In other words, cultivate your
differences, resist homogenization. Take responsibility for
your life rather than relinquishing it to est, religion -- or
a Jim Jones. Crisp's reference to the People's Temple, coming
on the heels of his discussion of style, has great power --
for cults are the antithesis of personal style. Easing away
from soberness, though, Crisp concedes that leaders of
cults can have great style. "People ask me if Hitler had
style, and I reply -- of course. Why else is Germany a country
of elderly people scratching their heads and saying, 'I don't
know what came over me'?" The theory of style Crisp
espouses, onstage as in life, is eminently debatable, but one
must admit that it has its points.
Nayatt School is, to say the least, another kettle of
fish. It is one of Three Places in Rhode Island, a trio
of theater pieces composed over a period of four years by
Spalding Gray and director Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom he
lives. Sakonnet Point (named for the Gray family's
summer residence) is an almost wordless evocation of childhood
through a series of images. Rumstick Road is a
semi-documentary voyage into the personality of Gray's mother,
who, after her first nervous breakdown, had a vision of Christ
and became a Christian Scientist and, after her second,
committed suicide. Among its real materials, the piece uses
tape recordings of awkward, ultimately inconclusive
discussions between Gray (nicknamed "Spud") and his
relatives, about his mother's death. Nayatt School,
which completes the trilogy, takes from its predecessors
various props and themes, especially childhood images and the
mystery of Gray's mother's suicide. But it gets all mixed up
with -- of all things -- T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party.
At the beginning of Nayatt School, Gray sits down at a
long table. Like Quentin Crisp, he has a pitcher of water
nearby, as well as a leather satchel and a record player. Gray
begins to talk almost offhandedly about his acting career --
shows he has been in, actors he knows, etc. -- and his
childhood. He explains that, because of a reading disability,
he listened to spoken-word records rather than reading books;
he also listened to the radio a lot and particularly relished
horror-story programs. He then begins discussing The
Cocktail Party, commenting at length on the Alec
Guinness/Irene Worth recording of the play, from which he
plays a brief snatch or two. As he does so, other people join
him at the table. Gray asks one woman to join him in a reading
of Eliot's scene between the psychiatrist Sir Henry
Harcourt-Reilly and Celia Copplestone. During the reading,
Gray occasionally stops to give the woman line-readings or to
point out to the audience significant passages. Another man
puts on a sad record, applies glycerine to his eyes, and
"cries." Much is made of Celia's statement, "I
should really like to think there's something wrong with me --
because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong...with
the world itself -- and that's much more frightening!"
Gray's manner, calm at first, becomes more ominous and
stylized until, at the end of the reading, when Celia decides
to enter a sanatorium, Nayatt School goes haywire.
Record players, records, and music seem to be everywhere. The
actors leave the table and move to another playing space where
they act out, in broad comic style, three scary sketches about
a jealous husband, a breast-cancer examination, and a
malignant chicken heart. Much craziness ensues, culminating in
a bizarre enactment of The Cocktail Party's final scene
(in which it is learned that Celia has gone to Africa as a
missionary and has been crucified by cannibals) featuring
children in four of the roles. Finally, Gray, another man, and
a woman return to the long table, destroy record albums, take
off their clothes, and gyrate grotesquely while squatting over
record players. Something is wrong with this world, and
it is frightening.
Even from the brief synopses I have given of these radically
different productions, intriguing contradictions emerge with
regard to autobiography and performance. Quentin Crisp's
discourse on style is essentially a self-justification; he has
looked back over a life mostly spent enduring and made
endurance a virtue. Asked whether, given the chance, he would
have lived his life differently, he seems puzzled: "It
could not have happened any other way." Sad and deluded
as he may seem, An Evening of Quentin Crisp is
obviously the creative sum of his experience. Nayatt School,
on the other hand, seems to indicate that nothing can be made
from the past. Gray clearly associates Eliot's Celia
Coplestone with his mothers; he sees in the character
parallels to his mother's struggle to reconcile physical and
spiritual life and her search for a beautiful vision. however,
coming at the end of a trilogy director LeCompte has claimed
is about "Spalding's love for the image of his mother,
and his attempt to repossess her through his art," Nayatt
School suggests that questions about the past, at least
the ones Gray poses, have no answers and that to pursue them
leads only to chaos and perhaps madness.
The other contradiction is this. Quentin Crisp has been a
regular person all his life, and by staging his autobiography
he has become -- at least by dint of appearing nightly on a
legitimate stage -- an actor. Spalding Gray has been an actor
all his life, and by using the details of his life story to
create Three Places in Rhode Island, he has lifted the
mask and become, almost unexpectedly, more of a person.
Boston Phoenix, February 1979
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