SWIMMING WITH SPALDING GRAY WRITER-ACTOR PACKS WIT, INTELLIGENCE, HUMOR INTO HIS MONOLOGUES

By Mary Colurso News Staff Writer
Source: Birmingham News
Tuesday,February 20, 2001
Edition: Volume 113 Issue 295, Section: Sports, Page 01-E

Spalding Gray sits at a table and talks for an hour or two.

That's it.

That's what he does.

That's all he does in his new show, Morning, Noon and Night.

In fact, that's the way he has created and performed 18 monologues that have brought him fame, and some fortune, in America's entertainment world.

Gray may never become a ubiquitous household name, but this 59-year-old writer and actor has earned respect in high places and an Obie Award - not to mention numerous prestigious fellowships - for his autobiographical theater works.

When the curtain goes up, Gray tells stories about his life, piecing anecdotes and ideas into freeflowing soliloquies that are crammed with anxiety, intelligence and humor.

Fans in Alabama are waiting to hear him do just that on Saturday night at Birmingham's Alys Stephens Center, where Gray will appear as part of the center's Young Patrons series.

"Monologues, to me, are like grand letters to friends," Gray says during a telephone interview. "This latest one is a love letter to my family."

Morning, Noon and Night, on his agenda for Saturday, relates the events in his life during one average day in Sag Harbor, Long Island, outside of New York City.

It's the story of Gray's relationship with his family - his partner, Kathie, a talent agent; her daughter Marissa, a precocious preteen "drama queen"; and Kathie and Spalding's two sons, elementary-schooler Forrest and baby Theo.

It's also the story of Gray's relationship with Sag Harbor, a town of rippling flags, white church spires and ivy-covered graveyards - a sleepy haven compared to his former home, a loft perched above the grimy streets and avant-garde hustle-bustle of lower Manhattan.

Finally, it's the story of Gray's obsession with a metaphysical topic that has obsessed him for years - the inevitability of death. As he nears 60, this artist is facing his mortality, contemplating a mysterious void that seems closer than ever before.

"I'm not ashamed to say that death is king for me, for my personal Spalding Gray ego," Gray says. "All of my monologues have the death factor. People think it's a bummer. Even when my life has become harmonious, death is still on my mind. But at the end of this monologue, I have a conversation with the disembodied voice of death, and it tells me to stop worrying so much. To enjoy life and love my family." Role in 'Killing Fields' This sounds like a much tamer, more settled Gray than admirers have come to know in monologues such Swimming to Cambodia, which detailed his offkilter adventures in Thailand, on location as an actor in the movie The Killing Fields.

Magic mushrooms, giggling prostitutes, the legacy of the Vietnam War and fights with his former girl friend, Renee, all loomed large in this story, which won an Obie, the off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony Award. Swimming to Cambodia was so successful, it was turned into a film, a book and an audiobook.

In many ways, this 1985-87 monologue served as a launching pad for those to follow, including Monster in a Box, Gray's Anatomy, Terrors of Pleasure and It's a Slippery Slope.

"Spalding usually takes his greatest fears and turns Gray, Page 3E 1E them into funny or profound thoughts," says Paul Spencer, the artistic consultant who helps Gray shape his material. "He's telling some very personal things."

From his public perch, Gray has examined the writer's block that stymied him when trying to finish a novel, an illness that caused him to lose much of the sight in his left eye, his disastrous purchase of a run-down cabin in upstate New York and his painful breakup with Renee, a longtime paramour (later his wife) who had no idea he'd fathered a child with Kathie.

Extreme honesty has always been a policy for Gray, who insists that all the events he recounts really happened, although time periods have been juggled, anecdotes compressed, his words laced with a touch of hyperbole.

"Oh, it's all true," he says, "but it's not everything. Obviously, I couldn't get my whole life into an hour and 40 minutes on stage."

Tension and complexity is built into the deceptively simple monologues, he says, because storylines always take place several years in his past. Morning, Noon and Night, for instance, is set in 1997. Yet during each performance, Gray must relive the tale as if it happened yesterday.

"The thing is, Spalding is hatching his next monologue when you're talking to him," Spencer says. "What he's saying on stage may not be what's really moving him at that point in his life."

People who have never seen Spalding Gray perform may wonder how one gray-haired man, sleeves rolled up on a flannel shirt, can hold a crowd's attention for so long. His props are few, after all - usually a stack of index cards and a glass of water at his side.

Gray will tell you that, like on any other night at the theater, the key to holding an audience in his thrall is good acting. However, his friend Spencer can come up with another explanation.

"Spalding's not at all a prima donna," he says. "His show is not about being obscure, obtuse or clever. It's not something that's over people's heads. And while his monologue may seem to put him in an odd situation, his feelings tend to be universal. He's out there, naked."

GRAY'S CREDITS RUN GAMUT FROM TV TO PRINT
Spalding Gray's resume includes:
Morning, Noon and Night (monologue, book, audiobook)
It's a Slippery Slope (monologue, book, audiobook,)
Gray's Anatomy (monologue, book, movie, video)
Monster in a Box (monologue, book, movie, video, audiobook)
Terrors of Pleasure (monologue, audiobook, HBO special)
Swimming to Cambodia (monologue, book, movie, video)
Sex and Death to the Age 14, (monologue, book, audiobook)
Impossible Vacation (book)
In Search of the Monkey Girl (book)
Orchards (book)
Booze, Cars and College Girls (monologue)
A Personal History of the American Theater (monologue)
First Words (segment from Monster in a Box on spoken-word compilation)
As an actor in supporting roles, he has appeared in films such as The Killing Fields, King of the Hill, Beaches, Beyond Rangoon, Coming Soon, Diabolique, The Paper, The Pickle, Straight Talk, Clara's Heart, Stars and Bars, Bad Company, Heavy Petting, True Stories, The Farmer's Daughter and Ilsa - Harem Keeper of Oil Sheiks.

His theater work in New York includes Thornton Wilder's Our Town (which later became a PBS special on Great Performances), Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime, Gore Vidal's The Best Man and an autobiographical trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island.

On television, he had a recurring role as a therapist on The Nanny and appeared on an episode of Spenser: For Hire.
Photo Caption:
PHOTO: Spalding Gray's name usually comes up when anyone mentions monologues in the theater community - so much so that playwright August Wilson says he has considered doing a one-man show called I'm Not Spalding Gray.

GRAY'S CONFESSIONAL TALE TOLD MASTERFULLY
By Mary Colurso News Staff Writer
Source: Birmingham News
Monday,February 26, 2001
Edition: Volume 113 Issue 300, Section: Lifestyle, Page 02-A

We can't crawl directly into another person's brain, as the characters did in the movie Being John Malkovich. But listening to one of Spalding Gray's monologues is the next best thing.

Gray, a 59-year-old writer and actor, offers an entrance to his psyche with his latest talkfest, Morning, Noon and Night. He performed this engaging theater piece Saturday at Birmingham's Alys Stephens Center.

The auditorium was far from packed; this was Gray's first time here and he lacked the pull of a major household name. However, fans and firsttimers who attended were amply rewarded.

Gray's 105-minute confessional tale, drawn from his family life in Sag Harbor, Long Island, combined personal anecdotes with universal themes in a masterful way.

Gray should know what he's doing; this is his 18th autobiographical monologue. He developed his stage style - ironic, wry, self-deprecating - long ago and perfected it with the award-winning Swimming to Cambodia in the mid-1980s.

That tale, mostly set in Thailand, was filled with heady politics, sexual exotica and drug-induced angst as Gray recalled being on location for the filming of The Killing Fields.

This time, he's relating the domestic events of a single day in 1997. Those concerned are Gray's partner, Kathie, a talent agent; her daughter, Marissa, a preteen drama queen; and Spalding and Kathie's sons, precocious kindergartner Forrest and blissful baby Theo.

Sound boring? Not a bit of it.

Although Gray has settled down some and tamed his wild ways, his imagination still soars in flights of fancy. He places marvelous oddball twists on events millions take for granted: hustling the kids to school, zipping along on a bike ride, slogging to the video store, trading barbs at the dinner table.

Gray single-handedly evokes the mindless cacophony a contemporary family produces, then switches to a metaphysical mode, gloomily pondering his mortality. Yet when the void looms too large, he manages to cross over to find a few precious moments of joy.

On Saturday, as always, Gray's enunciation and timing were priceless. Phrases such as "unpredictable rogue asteroids" rolled off his tongue like Shakespearean sonnets, endowed with complex humor and multiple shades of meaning.

PLEASE, LET SPALDING GRAY'S GENIUS BE ONLY INTERRUPTED

By Mary Colurso News Columnist
Source: Birmingham News
Friday,February 6, 2004
Edition: Volume 116 Issue 283, Section: Lifestyle, Page 15-G

I am hoping he's in an ashram somewhere - meditating on life, obsessing about sex, planning the next time he'll put on a flannel shirt and talk to us.

I am wishing that this - an absence of 28 days - means he's run off with a theater groupie, is hiding out in a cabin in the Catskills, or is having a moment too perfect to disturb in Thailand.

But not dead. Not a suicide from the deck of the Staten Island ferry.

Not Spalding Gray, the neurotic and brilliant performance artist and actor.

Let me state for the record that I don't know this unusual man. But I feel as if I do.

That was - is - Gray's genius. He has the ability to make complete strangers feel like intimates, simply by telling them odd, memorable, extremely well-written personal stories.

I am sure that whenever the end comes for Gray, works such as "Swimming to Cambodia," "Monster in a Box," "It's a Slippery Slope" and "Terrors of Pleasure" will form an enduring legacy, captured as they are on films and audio recordings. (Print doesn't do justice to his words, which require the presence of his unique voice - prim and WASPish, intellectual and eccentric.)

I am not sure, however, exactly what we'll know about his disappearance as you read this. Perhaps the mystery will be solved by then, but as of Wednesday afternoon, Gray, 62, was still missing.

By the way, I know this is supposed to be a music column. Sue me, OK? Or simply cut me a thematic break this week.

Let others discuss the details of Janet Jackson's breast-baring escapade at Sunday's Super Bowl half-time show. The lack of an appropriate undergarment on national television seems like such a trivial matter when compared to the lack of Spalding.

He was reported missing on Jan. 11 by his wife, talent agent Kathie Russo, who holds out little hope that Gray will be found alive.

"I feel in my heart that he has died," she says in an extensive article recently published in New York magazine. "I'm trying to accept it now."

More than most of us, Gray has always seemed to be stalked by death, and his monologues acknowledge the grinning skull that has occupied his thoughts since childhood and occasionally obsessed him.

"Death is king for me, for my personal Spalding Gray ego," he told me in February 2001, before a performance of "Morning, Noon and Night" at Birmingham's Alys Stephens Center. "I'm not ashamed to say it. Even when my life has become harmonious, death is still on my mind."

But his autobiographical musings have never ended on a tragic note, as Gray laughed at his own morbidity, made temporary peace with his demons or tentatively embraced joy.

From what I can tell, joy has been far from him in recent years, as Gray struggled to recover from severe injuries he received in a car crash in Ireland in June 2001. He had suffered from depression in the past, but it became worse after the accident, in which his skull was fractured, and his hip and right leg badly broken.

Family and friends have described his physical and mental pain as enormous. Russo said Gray made several suicide attempts - at one point, police had to talk him down from a bridge connecting Sag Harbor and North Haven on Long Island - and Gray warned her that he was contemplating a leap from the deck of the Staten Island ferry.

But after so much anguish, Gray appeared to be healing in the months before his disappearance. He had even begun to work again, although erratically and slowly, and had scheduled performances this year of "Life Interrupted," a monologue in progress about the accident and its aftermath.

Now that title sounds especially chilling, and if Russo is correct, may prove to be Gray's epitaph.
You may think I'm silly to worry about someone I've never actually met - a few professional phone conversations at different newspapers over the past 15 years don't count as an actual relationship - but I do have a long-standing relationship with Gray's excellent and highly confessional work.

Like thousands of other fans who've cherished his voice in their ears, I believe I'm entitled to fret about his well being on that basis.

I even feel guilty for saying that Gray's "Morning, Noon and Night" monologue, which held descriptions of domestic bliss, was less interesting than previous pieces because of a lack of dramatic strife. It was too soft, I thought, and not nearly wild enough.

But this latest development is too hard, and much too wild.
As I offer up a prayer for Spalding Gray, I also will tell you about an Alabama connection to his disappearance. There is one, and it's rather spooky.

On the day he vanished from the world, Gray had attended a screening of "Big Fish" in downtown Manhattan with his sons, Forrest, 11, and Theo, 6. The fantasy movie, filmed near Montgomery, made him weep.

At the end (if you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to read further), a man who's dying of cancer somehow defies his illness and jumps from a riverbank, transforming into a huge fish that swims out of sight.

Russo says she believes the film touched Gray deeply and gave him permission to die.

If life has been interrupted in this way for Spalding Gray, may he rest in peace.

Mary Colurso covers pop music and night life for The Birmingham News. To e-mail her, write to mcolurso@bhamnews.com.