Family guy

Spalding Gray organizes the chaos of life

by Bill Rodriguez

The picaresque novel may have gone the way of Don Quixote. The confessional poem may have died with Robert Lowell. Thank goodness we still have Spalding Gray -- our Huck Finn with neuroses -- to supply us with colorful, everyday adventures we instantly relate to. They are drawn from everyday life, with enough fears and tremblings to keep a psychoanalyst in red meat for a lifetime.

The celebrated monologist is back at Trinity Repertory Company, presenting a trio of performance pieces. (Tuesday's opening night performance was cancelled when inclement weather stranded Gray on Block Island.) He was last there in 1995, working on what was to become It's a Slippery Slope, which in his canny, offhanded way combined perilous skiing lessons with the death of his father, the end of a long relationship with his wife and professional partner and the birth of a son with a woman who is now his wife. Gray will reprise the final version. He will also do his latest work, Morning, Noon and Night, which looks at his new, less flamboyantly dramatic family life with what are now three children. In addition, the Barrington native will workshop a piece, Gray on Gray: A Lifelong Conversation, June 12 with his brother Rockwell, a St. Louis academic. (Brother Channing is music critic for the Providence Journal.)

A performance artist with the humor savvy of a stand-up comedian, Gray has crafted some 20 monologues since the late 1970s, beginning with the self-described Sex and Death to the Age of 14. Several have been published and made into performance films, such as the Obie-winning Swimming to Cambodia, which goes into his experiences while filming The Killing Fields, and Gray's Anatomy, which dealt with his hypochondria and real fear of losing his vision.

In a telephone conversation from his Long Island home, with the noise and voices of his kids in the background, Gray spoke about his work.

Q: I was interested to see that you were going to work with your brother Rocky. But you're a monologist, so doesn't that cramp your style?
A: Oh, no. Interviewing the audiences is something that I do regularly. Cramp my style -- heh. I welcome it. It doesn't cramp, it opens up my style, and it gives me a chance to do dialogue. And in this particular piece it's very unique and refreshing. In interviewing the audience, I'm trying to get to know people. In this I'm trying to -- what am I trying to do? It's interesting because we've only done it once, so I haven't formulated it. That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to it -- it's a real happening in that way. So what it causes me to do is to sort of rethink my relationship to my brother and who he is.

Q: Is family life changing your perspective on your life itself, since you're no longer looking at it through the filter of possible performance?
A: It makes it much more difficult. I still keep a journal, but the filter of performance and of organizing the chaos of my life and speaking of it in a form that is ultimately very entertaining is a great breathing mechanism for me. Sometimes I feel, when I don't have that, like I'm underwater too long and I don't have my oxygen tank and I'm about to get the bends. It gets very claustrophobic. So it's a new kind of struggle for me, of dealing with the quotidian and not reporting on it.

I'm still trying to figure out -- because I still want to do another monologue -- what I can do and still stay home that would be a different slant. I'm really thinking around terms of deconstruction and analysis right now, something a little less anecdotal . . . more phenomenological, existential; and deconstructing and thinking about how I think in relationship to another thinker. In other words, a dialogue with -- right now it's Sartre. Whether it will take the form of a monologue or not, I don't know.

Q: I've always wondered about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle effect with your work: has so closely observing your life for your performances changed what your life would otherwise be like?
A: It's got to have. Here's what happened. I think that I discovered that I was doing that all the time. In other words, narrative or anecdote is my way of coping with chaos. For instance, both Kathy and I have problems with flying, and we both had to do a lot of it this past month, touring. She's a lapsed Catholic but she still crosses herself. I look at people on airplanes and think that airplanes are the last non-denomination church in America. Everyone is doing some ritualized form of magical thinking or getting in touch with some positive aspect around the takeoff. Mine, I discovered, is that as soon as I get close to getting on that flight, for every moment I'm in the airport to the time we're up in the air, I am narrating it. I'm telling myself the story. And I realized that once I moved out of Christian Science at 17 and finally felt totally unprotected and no hotline to God -- of course, I was reading the existentialists then, and that's what brings it back to them. But there was an ongoing, nonstop narrative. So when somebody says, "When do you write?" I say, "All the time."

Q: That's how it affects you. But it also affects others. I understand that people have done bizarre things to get your monologues, haven't they?
A: Well, yes and no. Yes and no in the sense that you're never sure . . . I think of myself as a stranger attractor. That word I've lifted from chaos theory, but I've always been attracted to strangeness in my life. I suppose that somewhat grew out of my relationship with my mother, her rather erratic, bizarre temperament. So those people were often there in my life, and once I began to do monologues I began to comment on the stranger attractors.

I suppose that people, they have a knee-jerk reaction where they'll say something bizarre and then say, "Well, we don't want to hear this in a monologue." And what I really think they're saying is, "I wish it would be there." Because everyone wants to be a little larger than life.

Q: Someone observed that all your monologues before Morning, Noon and Night, which is centered around your children, were "about conquering something," often fears. Is this monologue different in terms of that kind of dynamic?
A: No, I think the conquering in here is the being able to live in the face of that it could all be taken away from me, all of it, and to love deeply the children. The crucial line in the monologue, toward the end is an epitaph, from an old cemetery: "It's a fearful thing to love what death can touch." And that is what has to be conquered in the monologue, the fear of love of something that can be torn away from you in a second. Within that, I also talk about time stealing Forrest away, which it has. He's now 7 and in the monologue he's 5. He's a completely different boy. I've seen him transformed. Gone. The five-year-old no longer exists.