Spalding Gray

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With the Stream

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SOURCE: "With the Stream," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIX, No. 48, 27 November 1984, p. 123.

[In the review below, Fuchs considers Swimming to Cambodia "an artistic culmination for Gray as well as an impressive political breakthrough."]

Spalding Gray has created eight autobiographical monologues since 1979. Initially charming in their intimacy, they later wearied as we followed Gray into various formal experiments, such as selecting words randomly in a dictionary (India (and After)) or holding up cue cards (A Personal History of the American Theatre) to generate memories. The last few seemed so slight that one wondered whether the vein had run out. One longed for the Spalding Gray of Three Places in Rhode Island, the performance-art trilogy created with Liz LeCompte and the Wooster Group, in which his autobiographical self somehow became the material of an entire dramatic universe. It seems now that Gray was in practice all these years to create in the monologue form the capaciousness of the earlier ensemble work. Swimming to Cambodia, especially Part I, represents an artistic culmination for Gray as well as an impressive political breakthrough.

Gray plays a small role in The Killing Fields, the ponderous recent film that attempts to tell the story of the Cambodian genocide. Despite its feints at documentary, the film is really—horrible to say—a soap opera. Swimming to Cambodia, built around the making of the film, and thus another layer of artifice removed from Cambodia's death agony, is nonetheless more serious politically, and more artistically shaped as well. Like several of Gray's earlier monologues, it tells the story of a journey, but moves beyond anecdote. Here the journey to Thailand to shoot the film is simultaneously Gray's awakening to personal responsibility in a grotesque political world. Gray doesn't announce his consciousness raising, but rather enacts it.

We first learn of Cambodia distantly, through the character of film producer Roland Joffé, whose words summon up a Shangri-la so joyful "they had lost track of evil." Later we learn in Gray's own blunt account how the Khmer Rouge cut out the livers of countrymen who worked with the Americans, gouged out eyes, disemboweled pregnant women. This horrific awakening is echoed moment to moment, as in the opening of Part I, where a glorious marijuana drug flight into a gold-leaf tunnel turns suddenly ominous as Gray gets sick on the beach creating "a death mask of my own vomit."

Throughout, Gray's story proceeds by daring "leaps and circlings," as my companion remarked, as if his perceptions of reality now imitated his earlier Cage-ean experiments. A documentary level, complete with maps, traces the rise and fall of Cambodian governments, the involvement of the Viet Cong, U.S. military policy in Southeast Asia and the Khmer Rouge whirlwind. A powerful story in its own right is the exploitation of Thai women, as bought "wives," ordinary prostitutes, and burlesque performers who cannonade bananas from their vaginas. It is an inspired stroke—in what would be Act Three if this were, as it often seems to be, a five-act play with dozens of characters—to bring in an apparently unrelated drunken encounter on a train with a U.S. Navy man who spends eight hours a day in a waterproof chamber of a nuclear submarine chained to a panel that controls a doomsday rocket. Gray couples this with a digression on his personal difficulties in handling anger. ("How can I think about the Russians if I can't solve a problem with a woman at Greenwich and North Moore?")

In such a tapestry, the actual story of the making of the film becomes a hallucinogenic recapitulation not only of the tragedy in Cambodia but of the universal torment by those who wield power of those who don't. Film itself is not merely a reflector but a performer in this dance of death, as when the crew of The Killing Field is greeted at a San Diego military base by overjoyed marines (is this Gray's fantasy?) "singing the 'tune' from Apocalypse Now."

The projection of Gray's dislocated WASP persona (the kind who has friends named 'Puffy') onto the world scene makes his black humor funnier than ever. Part II stays closer to the conflicts and anxieties of this familiar Spalding Gray, but portrays him as an Everyman in comic moral anguish. Should he stay on the film set long after his part is done, maintaining a kind of crazed witness to the world's suffering—though even here he writhes in what he takes to be unequal competition with film star John Malkovich—or should he return to the land of oblivion and get a West Coast agent? After all, says Gray, the Cambodian refugees blown by history to Long Beach want agents too. He is tortured by missiles and starving Ethiopians; the bluefish at a fancy party in the Hamptons is cooked with napalm. But there is Alan Watts's soothing echo in his ear, "Life is a party. So you happened to come in at the end of it," Gray's search for a "perfect moment"—a theme floating through both parts—could be an escape from reality or an ultimate reconciliation with it.

Swimming to Cambodia is shot with dreams and visions. Part II ends with the most powerful of these, Gray's dream in which a Cambodian boy, perhaps a straw effigy, burns from the legs up. As his smile is consumed by flames the room is filled with an "intelligent joy," but now he is gone forever, and Gray realizes that he will never be able to tell the boy's story. This disappearance even in the moment of greatest intensity grasps in an image the artist's shamanistic powers and pitiable frailty, a fitting end for a conflagration of ideas, characters, and motives pouring through a single performer seated at a wooden table with a glass of water.

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