I was in Jean Randich’s classroom at Bennington. I thought she was wild and wonderful. She was what I imagined when I dreamed up a New York director—scarves, short hair, glasses. She came into our “Making Plays” class and announced to us, worriedly, that Spalding Gray was missing.
I’ll admit, at the time, my familiarity with him was limited to one audio CD—a half-studio/half-live recording of his monologue It's a Slippery Slope. But I had been galvanized by that recording. I was worlds away from Mr. Gray in temperament. We had almost nothing in common, except both being WASPs, but I had connected with him on so many emotional and psychological levels. At the time, I did not consider myself neurotic though I was edging there.
What thrilled me about Gray was his openness, his willingness to admit the most difficult things about himself—things which would embarrass most anyone if spoken of in public. What thrilled me were his words—meant to be heard in a theater, but still glistening on the page. His memories—the way he told stories. I wanted to hug him, but I think it would have only put him off. I knew little of Gray’s car accident or the effects of it, but he talked of suicide so often one assumed he had succumbed.
Later, I found Gray’s other work. Swimming to Cambodia, though the one that made him famous, was not one that set me on fire, but I appreciated how such a small story about having such a small part in a relatively small movie could serve as the basis for a coherent, passionate, witty, engaging monologue.
The success of Cambodia brought forth a lot of Gray’s early work at the Wooster Group as part of the experimental theatres Off and Off-Off Broadway. An early monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14 is full of inspired and witty reminiscences. An audio cassette of it might have escaped my college library when I left Vermont.
His next major monologue, Monster in a Box, was crafted from his experience completing his only novel, Impossible Vacation. The resulting novel remains little-read, but the monologue was his second success on film and on tour. The cottage industry of crafting monologues with his partner, producer Reneé Shafransky, was in full swing.
The appearance of a macular pucker and the resulting surgery was chronicled in Gray's Anatomy, perhaps the most focused and distilled writing in Gray’s career. An experimental film, not recorded live, was released by Steven Soderbergh, who would go onto collect video of Gray to produce And Everything is Going Fine, which serves as both a documentary on Gray and his “final monologue.”
Slippery Slope, the monologue that had struck me as so open and moving, is generally considered one of the lesser works. This disconnect all comes from the change in Gray’s life moving from Shafransky to the mother of his children, Kathleen Russo. The monologues after were indeed different—calmer, more mature, less flashy. They would have made weak films—they might have been alright for premium cable. But they were also so baldly honest.
Slope was followed by Morning, Noon, and Night, which would be his final completed monologue. He was writing and performing about fatherhood and new beginnings. Then, a car crash in Ireland debilitated him. A fragment of a final monologue about the crash, Life Interrupted, was published with an audio track of Sam Shepard reading it. I went and purchased a copy when it came out.
Reading a monologue or solo show on the page can be very unrewarding. Great solo plays include the work of Dael Orlandersmith, Susan Miller, John Legiuzamo—obviously Samuel Beckett, but that’s perhaps a given. Outside of these, the texts go frequently unpublished as they are meant for one performer. But a few have lives of their own. Gray’s monologues are always rewarding on the page though they are meant to be heard.
Gray claimed dyslexia and being unable to read or write well. But Shafransky had helped him take two nights of material and condense it for the film of Camodia and it had a profound effect on how he arranged memories and chose what stories to tell. It gave him an editing edge that solo works often lack. He free associates, but he does not meander.
Other performers have tackled Gray’s writing onstage—a final evening in New York, Stories Left to Tell, had many actors doing lesser known and unfinished pieces by Gray.
Although raised Christian Scientist and in rural New England, Gray has more in common with the neurotic, psychoanalytical work of Jewish writers from New York, particularly those who write humor,. The preoccupations with moralism, God, death, sex, etc. of course are universal subjects, but the self-deprecation brings him more in line with Portnoy than a WASP of the Updike type.
On a human level, I wish Mr. Gray would have had some peace in his life. Some mechanism by which he could have been sent back to the factory and had the dread of life, the anguish of lust, the fear of death drained from him. Of course, without those, you would have drained the life’s blood of the work.
A little while later, after Jean had made her classroom announcement, they had found Gray’s remains, washed up from the East River. He had thrown himself from the Long Island ferry after seeing Tim Burton’s Big Fish, a film about tales and the tellers who tell them.
I imagined that cold water and a great writer’s body willowing around nibbling fish and noxious chemicals—a great performer sunk off the port of a city he loved and called home. The only other thing I could think was—boy, I wonder what Spalding Gray would have to say about something like that.
