Spalding Gray

American playwright

• Date of birth:June 5, 1941
• Place of birth:Barrington, Rhode Island
• Date of death:January 11, 2004
• Place of death:New York, New York

Biography

Spalding Gray, actor, writer, and monologist, was hailed by critics as one of America’s outstanding storytellers. Born and raised in Rhode Island, his experiences in New England served as the foundation for much of his autobiographical writing and performance. He moved to New York City in 1959 to become a writer but got involved in theater instead. In his works, he blended personal and social history, which afforded his performances a diverse universality, resulting in what he referred to as “poetic reporting.” When Gray was twenty-six years old, his mother committed suicide, leaving a profound impact on him.

Gray began his writing career as a cofounder and performer in the experimental theater company the Wooster Group in 1975. Prior to that, he and Elizabeth LeCompte had worked with Richard Schechner in the Performance Group. While with the Wooster Group, Gray’s personal stories comprised the bulk of a trilogy titled Three Places in Rhode Island. The success of the trilogy and, more important, the finding of his own voice convinced Gray that, for him, the end of the collaborative group process’s usefulness had come.

In 1979, Gray returned to the Performing Garage in New York City to present his first major monologue, Sex and Death to the Age Fourteen. This was followed by five additional pieces about growing up in New England. Contained in the same volume, the pieces are titled Booze, Cars, and College Girls; Forty-Seven Beds; Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk; Travels through New England; and Terrors of Pleasure: The House. These monologues were performed throughout the United States and Europe during the early 1980s.

Gray’s work as a performer also appeared on Off-Broadway and in film. His most notable live theater credits include the revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) and the New York premiere of The Tooth of Crime (1972) by Sam Shepard. His film credits include the feature films Kate and Leopold (2001), Beyond Rangoon (1995), Beaches (1988), Clara’s Heart (1988), and The Killing Fields (1984). In addition, four of his own works were filmed: Monster in a Box (1991), directed by Nick Broomfield; Spalding Gray: Terrors of Pleasure (1988), an HBO special; Swimming to Cambodia (1987), directed by Jonathan Demme; and Gray’s Anatomy (1996), directed by Steven Soderbergh.

It was his role in Roland Joffe’s feature film The Killing Fields that provided the impetus for Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, a “poetic documentation” of his experiences in Thailand while shooting the film. This piece marked a distinct shift in Gray’s writings to the more immediate, personally intimate events of midlife. Monster in a Box (1992) chronicles the saga of writing his first novel; Gray’s Anatomy deals with the existential torment of discovering that the human body is a fragile entity; It’s a Slippery Slope (1997) explores skiing as a concept about the balance between body and mind, and Morning, Noon, and Night (1999) extols the newfound joys and anxieties of fatherhood. To date, Gray developed and performed eighteen monologues, eleven of which appear in print.

His only novel, Impossible Vacation (1992), is a lightly veiled biographical piece in which the main character, Brewster North, is a New England puritan who finds it difficult to take pleasure when in very pleasurable places. In other words, Brewster cannot bring himself to take a vacation. When he finally does, his mother commits suicide. The novel then explores the guilt and angst Brewster encounters as a result.

With the exception of Impossible Vacation, Gray’s books were written after he had exhaustively performed the material before a live audience. He worked from notes during performance, telling and retelling the material until it solidified into a unified whole. He then published the work. As a result, the reading audience received a text that reads as a stream-of-consciousness novel, easily blending the past with the present. Gray stated that all of his stories were a reporting of actual events, sometimes slightly embellished, a memory of a memory. It was blending of memory and reflective reporting that made his work so compelling. Spalding Gray received critical acclaim for his writing and his performance both on stage and on screen. He received an Obie Award for Swimming to Cambodia.

In June 2001, Gray and his wife, Kathleen Russo, were involved in a severe car accident while they were vacationing in Ireland. Gray suffered from a broken hip, a compound fracture of the eye socket and skull, and brain injury to his right frontal lobe. His ability to walk was permanently altered, and his brain injury is thought to have triggered a deep depression that plagued him in his final years. Between 2002 and 2003, he was admitted on several occasions to psychiatric clinics following suicide attempts. In October 2003, he began performing a monologue about the accident and its effect on him, titled Life Interrupted. On the night of January 10, 2004, Gray was seen boarding the Staten Island ferry; he then disappeared for two months until his body surfaced in the East River. He is thought to have committed suicide by jumping from the ferry. He was survived by his wife and his three children, Marissa, Forrest, and Theo. In 2005, his final monologue was published as a book with the title Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue. A documentary chronicling Gray's life, titled And Everything Is Going Fine and directed by Soderbergh, was released in 2010.

Bibliography

Auslander, Philip. Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Print.

Dewan, Shaila K., and Jesse McKinley. "Body of Spalding Gray Found; Monologuist and Actor Was 62." New York Times. New York Times, 9 Mar. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2016.

Gray, Spalding. Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue. New York: Crown, 2005. Print.

Leverett, James. “Introduction: Spalding Gray.” Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2000. Print.

Peterson, Michael. Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. “Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia: The Article.” Critical Texts 5.1 (1988): 27–30. Print.

Sacks, Oliver. "The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray's Brain Injury." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 27 Apr. 2015. Web. 23 Aug. 2016.

Williams, Alex. "Vanishing Act." New York. New York Media, 2 Feb. 2004. Web. 23 Aug. 2016.