Swimming to Cambodia
[In the following assessment of a performance of Swimming to Cambodia, Gerson interprets the piece as a meditation on the loss of shared morality in the modern world: "We live in a world without moral compass, a world in which small outrages rank with large ones simply because we have lost all sense of scale in evaluating human affairs."]
Swimming To Cambodia, a monologue written and performed by Spalding Gray is the last of a series of three such works offered by the Mitzi Neuhaus Theatre at Lincoln Center. Ostensibly, the piece is a fever chart of Gray's work on the film, The Killing Fields, and as such is an impressionistic, introspective revelation. Yet in interweaving his experience from his film work in contemporary Cambodia, his knowledge of the genocide that took place under Pol Pot, and his understanding of life in contemporary America, Gray outlines a continuum of atrocity between the American and Asian continents.
The monologue, ranging freely in time and space, is comprised of fractured, discontinuous episodes. The several stories do not seem to be moral equivalents, moving as they do from urban nuisance to Cambodian genocide. Yet this technique serves to force parallels between domestic and international outrage—and, perhaps more importantly, to point up their connection. Within the same hour and a quarter, the audience is treated to a numbing span of contemporary and historical events: a Nazi mass execution; a verbal portrait of the savagery unleashed by the Khmer Rouge; an offensive upstairs neighbor in New York City; mass prostitution in Bangkok; the prolonged United States' bombing of Cambodia. Gray reports all noncommittally; none of his tones trill in outrage. Nor does he state any of the obvious conclusions. The positioning of the pieces makes the historical point.
Although the moral issues raised in Swimming to Cambodia are of global significance, somewhere embedded in all this narration is a specific indictment of the United States for creating the requisite conditions for atrocity in Cambodia. The unspoken question in the piece seems to be: what kind of nation have we become to bestow automatic moral probity upon a Pol Pot simply because he answers to the tag of non-Communist?
By way of an answer, we are offered an episode concerning a young naval recruit named Jim. Gray meets him aboard a train bound for Pittsburgh. En route, Jim expounds on the special dynamics of his existence. He explains his predilection for threesomes, domination, submission, that whole "power thing." Spouting a Cold War litany, he tells Gray of his firm commitment to stop the Russians. His job is ideally suited to this imperative: he is tied to a wall in a nuclear battleship, his finger on a green button, just waiting to launch Armageddon. When Gray points out that Jim could easily destroy the whole world, the latter reveals that the Navy has provided him with a list of places that will be safe from radiation in the event of a blast. As Gray dourly notes, Jim will be safe while the rest of us are vaporized. Jim feels no compunction over the many millions that will die in a nuclear exchange; we must prevail over Communism. We leave him contemplating megadeath.
The monologue also focuses on the expendability of human life in a more quotidian context. Gray's upstairs neighbor makes incessant noise into the wee hours. Neither civility nor threat has dampened her enthusiasm for nocturnal riot. Over the course of time, the woman has become, in fact, progressively more offensive. Frustrated, Gray heaves an empty beer bottle through the offender's window. The action nearly precipitates a battle to the death with the woman's allies.
The unifying theme of the piece seems to be the relative value assigned to human life. In Pol Pot's Cambodia, there was no value assigned at all. In Pat Pong, Bangkok, bodies are fractionalized according to a schedule of escalating fees for prostitution. In New York City, human life may well be worth the price of a beer bottle.
This disparity confuses Gray, and it is at this juncture that sociological comment becomes ontological reflection in his piece. What has become of the cultural fraternity that existed in Gray's native Boston where a phone call appealing to mutual civility could accomplish détente? With the lack of a consensually defined humanism, we have lost a common notion of humanity and with it, all sense of proportion. We live in a world without moral compass, a world in which small outrages rank with large ones simply because we have lost all sense of scale in evaluating human affairs.
As usual, Gray's set is a black backdrop and some simple furniture: a desk, a chair, a couple of maps. He relies on himself and is, for the most part, riveting. If at times he lapses into the routine of a stand-up comic, it is because such kitsch is the only relief to the anomie which Swimming to Cambodia relentlessly expounds.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
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Somebody to Talk About
Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and the Evolution of an Ironic Presence