Spalding Gray
[Focusing particularly on Swimming to Cambodia, Jenkins emphasizes the importance of memory in Gray's work. "Memory is a recurring character in every one of his performances, " Jenkins states. "It is pitted against the dangerous human tendency to forget the past without reflecting on its meaning."]
I like to think of myself as a kind of 'poetic reporter,' more like an impressionist painter than a photographer. Most reporters get the facts out as quickly as possible—fresh news is the best news. I do just the opposite. I give the facts a chance to settle down until at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory and reflection.
—Spalding Gray
Spalding Gray is a virtuoso rememberer. He takes raw memory and sculpts it into finely wrought performances of epic autobiography. Sitting at a table and talking directly to the audience, Gray performs feats of poetic recall that are remarkable in their clarity, resonance and wit. In a culture where collective memory has atrophied and been replaced by a television tube, audiences respond with rapt attention to the simple authenticity of Gray's personal chronicles.
There are moments in Gray's low-keyed monologues when he seems to be caught in the act of remembering. His voice and gestures create the impression that he is conjuring up the past as he speaks, as if his memory were leaving tangible traces of its efforts. The rhythm of his delivery is peppered with hesitations. The lines in his face wrinkle with concentration. His hands move out in front of him as if they are reaching for images on the verge of being forgotten. Although it all appears spontaneous and casual, each nuance is artfully crafted. Gray has mastered the art of self-performance so completely that even his stammers are planned.
In the process of giving his memories a physical shape, Gray sifts them through the filters of contemporary culture. His stories reach the audience through a series of prisms. Gray performs himself remembering himself, as if he were seeing himself in a movie or reading about himself in a newspaper or watching himself on television. His exercises in hyperautobiography are shaped by the popular media that dominate American society. Gray's stories reflect collective as well as personal anxieties. He remembers his past in terms of his relationships with other people and those relationships are mediated by the demands of their shared culture. Gray's stories are full of vivid portraits of people he has met, and each of those portraits is conveyed in a narrative style rooted in the rhetoric of mass communications. Gray is a one-man newspaper reporter, cinematic auteur and television talk-show host. His multiple roles give even his most intimate memories a sense of ironic detachment. He narrates his past like a man who has difficulty believing it, but is determined to re-play it in an effort to make sense of his era.
Gray began performing his autobiographical monologues as an outgrowth of his work with the Wooster Group at New York's Performing Garage. In 1975 the company began work on a trilogy of plays based on Gray's recollections of growing up in Rhode Island. The success of these ensemble productions led Gray to investigate the possibilities of performing his past as a sit-down monologist. The first of these efforts, Sex and Death to the Age 14, was presented at the Performing Garage in 1979. Since then he has performed the collected chronicles of his life in theatres all over the country. A Personal History of the American Theatre was broadcast on the PBS Alive from Off Center series. Terrors of Pleasure appeared on HBO. And Swimming to Cambodia was released in movie theatres as a feature film directed by Jonathan Demme.
The stories in Gray's monologues are always centered around his personal experiences, but he places them in the context of characters and events that mirror the rich landscape of American dreams and nightmares. A Personal History of the American Theatre is as much about the success ethic of American artists as it is about Gray's own life as an actor. Gray simply recounts stories about the plays in which he has performed, but he has worked in enough different settings to make his oral memoirs representative of the profession. He moves deftly from the excesses of Stanislavsky-styled realism in Texas regional theatre to avant-garde experiments with grunting and groping disciples of Grotowski in Manhattan, providing oblique insights into the state of the arts in America at the same time that he casts light on the origins of his own storytelling impulses. He says that as a child he discovered that acting things out was "a kind of ontological state. … Life was kind of boring for me in Barrington, Rhode Island, and I would dramatize it by taking any cue from life and blowing it up a bit, theatricalizing it." Theatricalization of his experiences includes putting them in a social and historical perspective. His childhood memories as retold in Sex and Death to the Age 14 are framed by the atomic explosion at Hiroshima and the first test of the hydrogen bomb.
Swimming to Cambodia (1984) is an example of Gray's multileveled narrative style at its most complex. It began as a monologue about his involvement in The Killing Fields, a movie based on a magazine article about a war that most people saw only on television. Gray's performance technique is as densely textured as the layers of media memory in which the story has been wrapped. With a few maps and a pointer as his only props, Gray never moves from his chair, but he presents his tale in a style that subtly incorporates elements of each media through which the incidents have been recalled.
Gray opens the theatre version of his piece with a journalistic dateline: "Saturday, June 18, 1983. Gulf of Siam. Thailand." Then he fleshes out the details with verbal and gestural imagery that is cinematically arresting in its specificity. The colored maps he uses enable Gray to convey history and background information with the entertaining ease of a Sunday newspaper magazine supplement. And all the way through he cuts from one story fragment to another with the startling velocity of a television newsreel montage. Having assimilated the rhetorical devices of mass culture without losing the intimacy of old-fashioned storytelling, Spalding Gray transforms personal memory into a miniature spectacle with epic overtones.
While many performers have been reduced by entertainment technology into shells of vapid personality, Gray uses his understanding of mass media to sharpen his senses of perception and heighten his performance of the things he perceives. His gestures and vocal intonations are deeply influenced by the media through which his memories are filtered. Recounting the filming of a helicopter scene in The Killing Fields, Gray visually creates the sense of leaving the ground by tilting his head and torso. The illusion of television immediacy is furthered when he begins to shout as if his voice had to carry over the sound of the spinning copter blades. Shifting perspectives quickly, he paints word pictures of the jungle stretching out below him that are the equivalent of a cinematic long shot.
Gray's seemingly random jump cuts are carefully spliced into his monologues to provide the story with texture and resonance that transcend the cross-media grab-bag effect of the story's surface. A poetic writer with a vibrant sense of language, Gray creates cross references that are novelistic as well as cinematic. The tragicomic portrait of Thai peasants hired to imitate the Cambodian dead by smearing chicken blood on their bodies echoes an episode Gray spoke about a few minutes earlier. To pacify Cambodian villagers who had been accidentally bombed by American B-52s, U.S. Embassy officials gave out hundred-dollar bills to families of the dead and fifties to people who had lost arms or legs. Gray's deadpan juxtaposition of these two events satirizes the absurdity of equating the loss of limbs with a cash bonus. Linking the callous values of the filmmakers with those of the American government, Gray's disarmingly simple story-telling begins to assume the dimension of a spoken epic novel.
Gray's oral epic is full of sophisticated literary devices, but his performance language is informed with implicit references to modern media. The filmic quality of Swimming to Cambodia was established before Gray ever considered making a movie of the piece. Crosscutting, montage and closeups are embedded in the structure of Gray's visual memory and have nothing to do with Demme's camera work, which is notable primarily in the way it enhances the cinematic qualities that Gray had already built into his stage performance. In the part of Swimming to Cambodia where Gray mocks the parallels between movie production and government policy, he makes his points with acting techniques that demonstrate the blurred boundaries between the realms of film and politics. Gray combines the cool detachment of a politician working a crowd with the emotional intensity of a director zooming in for a closeup.
Making a movie about the bombing of Cambodia reminds Gray of demonstrations against the war in Washington and Kent State. He interrupts his description of the movie shoot to remind us that Nixon watched reruns of Patton while students demonstrated outside the White House. Gray flashes Nixon's famous double-V sign with upraised arms as he describes the President's midnight visit with the protesters. In a rapid succession of words and gestures, Gray creates a montage of images that recreate that moment in history as if it were a TV movie. Nixon on the phone asking advice from Norman Vincent Peale and Henry Kissinger. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge eating nuts and berries in the countryside outside Phnom Penh. General Alexander Haig declaring Cambodian President Lon Nol to be mentally unstable because he wept openly when he saw that his nation's downfall was at hand.
Gray presents this potpourri of past events with a vocal tone that suggests the objectivity of documentary realism at the same time that it hints at irony. The rhythmic pace of his story builds to a series of urgent crescendos. Every so often he stops unexpectedly, as if to reflect on the outrageous incongruities inherent in what he has just reported. The pauses encourage us to reexamine the implications of the particular image that has just passed before us, as if it were being singled out for an instant replay. Nixon, for example, inanely asking one of the student demonstrators, "How's your team doing?"
Like a good journalist, Gray uses direct quotes to help dramatize his story, but his objectivity is only an illusion. His information is factual, but his opinions seep through in the editorial shifts of his intonation and facial expression. With subdued tones of empathy and respect, Gray reads a letter from a Cambodian prince to the American ambassador refusing the offer of safe passage when the American troops withdraw from Phnom Penh. "I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion," writes Sirik Matak. Gray dutifully reports that five days later the prince's liver was carried through the streets on a stick. Choosing that moment to take a sip of water, Gray creates a silence in which to begin his account of the Cambodian genocide. Detailing the nightmares of the "worst autogenocide in modern history," Gray hypothesizes a cloud of evil that comes down on the earth and drives men to unthinkable actions: "… babies torn apart like fresh bread in front of their mothers." His voice seems muted by the horror of what he describes, as if the same dark cloud were muffling his words.
Next, in an artful cinematic cut that hints at the connections between the Cambodian atrocities and the anti-Communist prejudices of individual Americans, Gray moves from the killing fields of Cambodia to an Amtrak lounge car. There he meets a Navy man who tells Gray he spends most of his time chained to a chair in a waterproof missile silo waiting for orders to push a green button that will launch a nuclear attack. Recreating his conversation with the man, Gray turns his head from side to side as he switches from the booming certainty of the sailor's militaristic anti-Russian prejudices to the incredulous confusion of Gray's stammering responses. The dialogue plays like a television talk show with Gray as the befuddled host.
Audiences accustomed to perceiving experience in electronically condensed bits of packaged information are fascinated by the compelling power of Gray's artistry. The public's interest in his technique becomes apparent when Gray performs a piece entitled Interviewing the Audience. He invites members of the audience onto the stage to talk about their own lives, but when they are given a chance to ask questions, they want Gray to tell them how he makes his stories so intriguing. "How do you make your life sound so interesting?" "How do you get people to say such funny things?" "How do you get people to pay attention to you for so long?" These are some of the questions Gray is asked one evening at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The concerns of the audience are symptomatic of a society that has surrendered its communication skills to its television sets. Everyone wants to learn how to make their own life as funny and appealing as the monologues of their favorite celebrity talk-show host. They feel insecure about their abilities to reach out to one another through the simple exchange of conversation, and Gray offers them a model of a man talking about himself with a grace, charm and humor that draws people close to him. His style of storytelling satisfies the part of their nature that hungers for direct human contact, unmediated by technological intervention.
One of Gray's interviewees that Cambridge evening is a reporter for the Boston Globe. She laments the fact that she can never get people to say interesting things when she interviews them for her articles. Furthermore, she fears that she herself has nothing very interesting to say and wonders aloud whether anyone in the audience has really had a good conversation lately. A few people claim to have had satisfying discussions about movies or politics. One man said he had a good talk about reincarnation after reading about it in the National Enquirer. But most people seemed to agree that conversations in their personal lives left much to be desired. For both the reporter who wants to get more informative details from her interviews and average people who want more spice in their private gossip, Gray is a source of envy and inspiration.
His answers to the audience's questions are enlightening. He tells them that he develops his monologues by listening to them over and over again on tape. Each night he tapes his show, and tries to improve it, basing each new performance not on the original monologue, but on the most recent version of it. Eventually he dispenses with the tape recorder and constructs each new performance on the memory of the one that has preceded it. Ultimately his show becomes a memory of a memory of a memory of a story that has been distilled down to its essence through the process of continually being retold. Gray appears so natural on stage not because he is just being himself, but because he is so well practiced at impersonating himself as he remembers himself performing himself. This is similar to what politicians do when they make public appearances impersonating the images they have carefully cultivated to win the approval of voters.
But while politicians play their roles in earnest, Gray impersonates himself with a clearly self-deprecating sense of ironic detachment.
This self-reflexive irony is the key to Gray's keen sense of humor. While the humor of a master self-performer like Ronald Reagan is calculated to lull the listeners into a reassuring state of acceptance, Gray's ironic humor is designed to encourage thoughtful reflection and critical questioning. He makes things funny by asking us to examine their credibility. In Terrors of Pleasure Gray plays a tape recording of a message left on his answering machine by an unscrupulous real estate salesman. The tone of Gray's voice when he introduces the recording and the expressions that pass across his face as he listens to it generate a mood of comic skepticism that makes the man's declarations of trustworthiness howlingly funny. Even more ludicrous, Gray makes clear, is the fact that he actually bought property from this man. Gray is so skilled at conveying this sense of self-mocking irony that he often casts a comic sense of doubt on his own words as he speaks them. A perfect example of a Brechtian actor, Gray has mastered the art of speaking in the first and third person simultaneously. He projects a sense of thinking about the significance of what he says, even as he is in the process of saying it.
The quality of thoughtfulness at the heart of Gray's ironic acting style makes him an undesirable candidate for typical commercial acting roles. In Terrors of Pleasure Gray tells the story of auditioning for a part in a television movie opposite Farrah Fawcett. The director liked him but was disturbed by something he noticed about Gray's acting in the screen test. A quality that he could only describe as "thinking" seemed to pass across Gray's face whenever he was supposed to make romantic advances towards Fawcett. That reflective quality prevented Gray from projecting the ail-American "go-for-it spirit" the director was looking for, so he didn't get the role. Apparently Gray's thoughtfulness created the appearance of doubt, hesitation and ambivalence, tones that are not conducive to selling the products advertised on television, but are essential for generating the kind of disturbingly ironic humor at which Gray excels.
Gray's tones of human ambivalence are what distinguishes his memories from the mass media's versions of the past. There is an illusory objectivity to cameras and newsprint that Gray's style avoids. He may borrow the jumpcuts of cinema or the direct quotes of journalism, but he never pretends to be certain about anything. His stance is one of perpetual doubt. In Swimming to Cambodia he approaches the Vietnam War with a questioning tone that penetrates past the video pictures of network news and the deceptive myths of Hollywood war films. He uses these common images as a starting point, but transforms them into a kind of personalized multimedia narrative about the awakening of a political conscience. As he talks about flying up in the helicopter on location in Thailand, and describes the film producer's re-creation of dead bodies and burning villages below him, the cadences of his story accelerate markedly. His gestures pulse with the chaotic urgency of battle. There is no door on the helicopter and he is dangerously high above the ground, but he isn't afraid because he's in a movie and is comforted by the camera's power to eroticize the space it aims at. "Like Colgate Gard-All," he blurts out ridiculously, invoking the protection of an old television-commercial toothpaste shield.
Gray speaks and moves with an even greater velocity as he realizes that the movie version of the war is almost as terrifying as the real event. In a flash of intuition he comes up with the idea of "War Therapy." Countries could heal the traumas of war by reenacting it in fictional form. Gray describes his newly invented form of social healing as if it were a demented version of The Dating Game. Gray has lost the ability to distinguish history from the image of history he remembers in the media. He remembers seeing B-52s in the television coverage of Vietnam in the sixties but when he tries to imagine a connection between himself and the real war, Gray can only think of himself as riding a helicopter in Apocalypse Now. The closest association he can make to the real war is a scene from another movie.
Gray's portrayal of his frenzied condition in the helicopter gathers a breathless momentum. It is full of irony, ambivalence and mental doubletakes. The producer hopes his experience in the film will teach Gray that "morality is not a movable feast," but Gray maintains that he "sees it moving all the time." In the swirling complexity of his imagery Gray makes his audience see morality move as well. He generates a whirlwind of cross-media references that dizzy our senses. His arms move back and forth as if he is literally trying to maintain his moral equilibrium in the blur of game shows, TV commercials, film and history. His awakening conscience has to contend with a media blitz that dulls his senses into forgetting that actions have consequences that outlast the closing credits.
In Swimming to Cambodia, as in Gray's other monologues, there does not seem to be any source for the kind of conflict found in traditional drama. Gray's theatre is fueled by a different kind of conflict: the conflict between memory and forgetting. Remembering the real implications of war as distinct from the media's manufactured implications is crucial to Gray's awakening conscience in Swimming to Cambodia. The interdependence of memory and morality is central to all his work. Gray's portrayal of the struggle between individual memory and the forgetfulness induced by mass media is a potent dramatization of one of our era's most troubling dilemmas. Gray enacts this struggle each time he pulls a surprising detail out of the past and makes us believe it has just occurred to him at that moment. His stammers, his pauses, and the visible traces of thinking that pass over his face are the tangible manifestations of his unwillingness to let history slip away from him undigested. Memory is a recurring character in every one of his performances. It is pitted against the dangerous human tendency to forget the past without reflecting on its meaning.
The drama in Gray's monologues is not born out of emotional clashes. It comes from the excitement of watching him analyze, question, ridicule and embrace the details of the incidents he so artfully recalls. The audience is witnessing an intimate act in the mind of a rememberer, made visible by the power of Gray's extraordinary performance skills. They are enraptured, not because they necessarily identify with the story he is telling, but because they identify with his need to tell it. Responding to a society in which the individual is bombarded with so many images that he runs the risk of forgetting their significance, Gray stages modern morality plays, with memory as the self-reflexive hero slashing away at the dragon of mass-media oblivion. Appealing to his audience's deep collective need to remember, Gray's performance suggests the possibility of salvaging the past simply by caring enough to think about it.
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