Pop art

Spalding Gray discovers parenthood

by Carolyn Clay

MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT. Written and performed by Spalding Gray. Creative consultant Paul Spencer. With the voice of Meghan Coleman. At Trinity Repertory Company, through June 18.

I still remember the first time Spalding Gray stood up. It was in Monster in a Box that he arose to demonstrate something he'd done to his pants amid a typically outlandish experience in a Russian museum. The man previously perceived as a shock of white hair and a lumberjack shirt attached to a little wooden table and a water glass was on his feet. Yikes, I thought, Spalding Gray has legs! And he does, in both senses of the term. The Rhode Island-born monologuist has been telling his peculiarly revealing, oddly universal tales since 1979, seemingly without exhausting the wells of wit or perception. And, oh yes, he stands up big-time in Morning, Noon and Night, rising toward the end of the monologue to perform a heady, hip-gyrating dance as the sounds of Chumbawamba issue from a yellow boombox. It's family hour at the Gray house, and the whole clan -- partner Kathie, stepdaughter Marissa, and sons Forrest and Theo, the last a babe in arms but swept into the movement nonetheless -- are on their feet, pulsing to the beat. Peter Pan has become Ozzie Nelson crossed with John Travolta -- without, of course, ceasing to look down the tunnel of his navel or spar with Death.

Fans of Gray will be surprised by the changes in the life that fuels his work. Having swum to Cambodia, searching for the Perfect Moment while paddling into a new awareness of American politics; having skied the slippery slope as one very public private life came undone and another began; and having dealt with the specter of his mother's suicide in more works than one, the ever-questing Gray has settled into family life in Sag Harbor, New York, with Kathie and the kids. In Morning, Noon and Night he takes us on a ride through a single fall day in 1997, when Forrest is five, Theo is a baby, and Marissa, at 11, fears she'll die a virgin.

Little more happens here than when Gray was stage-managing Grover's Corners in a 1988 Lincoln Center production of Our Town. The monologuist practices yoga and takes a bike ride. He and Forrest -- the sort of profoundly inquisitive kid Art Linkletter would kill for -- rent videos, including The Nutty Professor and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Gray interrupts an afternoon of lawnmowing for a quickie with Kathie in the shed that serves as his writer's studio. Dinner is eaten, ice cream is gone out for, and the eternal verities are masticated in typical Gray fashion. And Chumbawamba knock everyone away from the table and into the dance of family life. Sound about as exciting as watching paint dry? Think again. The 59-year-old Gray has lost his wanderlust and maybe some of his obsessive compulsion without losing his performer's compass or his inner edge. Even as he embraces parenthood while eyeing ironically an almost hoky life, he keeps up his chat with a character still to come: the Reaper.

In fact, parenthood -- which finds the monologuist both bemused and ga-ga -- has only whetted his awareness of mortality. "It is a fearful thing to love what Death can touch," he intones with the sonority of a drain, quoting yet another old epitaph from the historic cemetery near his home. (Sag Harbor, it would seem, is a quaint cluster of churches, dead people, and real-estate offices, a "sweet illusion of permanence" in a world whose harsh reality is change.) But if Gray goes gravelly when contemplating the Inevitable, then the "Disembodied Voice of Death" -- which comes to him, courtesy of the boombox, in a dream -- sounds, hilariously, as upbeat as one of the Bradys.

Gray was fluffing his words on opening night at Trinity Rep -- a shame since his words are often quite artfully strung together, moving toward tongue-twisting, bravura climaxes. The performer has become more theatrical as time has gone by, not just slipping out from behind the armor of his table but cooking up flamboyant verbal set pieces with killer finishes. Moreover, his trademark, neurotic self-observation takes on another dimension in Morning, Noon and Night: having assumed this new, unlikely domestic persona, he seems to be gazing into a nested series of navels. As he puts it, "I feel like `Ozzie' Russo, who is being played by Spalding Gray." (Russo is Kathie's name, and the army of workmen who pass through Gray's antique house assume it's his as well.)

Part of Gray's appeal has always been the combination, in his stage persona, of being game for anything and willing to tell you anything. When he was prowling Bangkok whorehouses or panicking in an Indian sweat lodge, he was our reporter in foreign climes. In his last two pieces, he explores less exotic territory, but with the same ironic humor and disarming candor. In It's a Slippery Slope (which he'll perform at Trinity this Friday, June 16), he describes the midlife and marital crises -- suffered while learning to ski -- that led him to Morning, Noon and Night. And the newer piece makes cake of even more mundane materials.

It's hard to know where Gray will go from here; he has said he will not perform more monologues about the family (wouldn't want to turn little Forrest into Cody Gifford). But he succeeds in Morning, Noon and Night, amid Forrest's etymological and ontological queries and the cacophonous drone of family life, in putting his finger on the way in which parenthood both liberates and terrifies you. For better or worse, he remains the receptacle for our collective anxiety -- even when he's shaking it up, like an unopened Coke, to Chumbawamba.