Spalding Gray

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Somebody to Talk About

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SOURCE: "Somebody to Talk About," in The New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1987, pp. 40, 92-4.

[In the following article, Simpson contends that "most of all," Swimming to Cambodia "is about what it's like to be Spalding Gray. " She also discusses with Gray the making of the film version of the piece.]

As the movie opens, a middle-aged man in an unimpressive coat walks through New York traffic, hands jammed in his pockets. He enters a street-level door below a small sign that says "The Performing Garage." Inside, at one end of a large room, an old wooden table holds a pitcher and glass of water. The man, now in a plaid shirt, minus the coat, sits down, places a Ronald McDonald spiral notebook on the table, takes a sip of water, faces the camera and begins to speak:

"Saturday, June 18, 1983, Hua Hin, Gulf of Siam, Thailand. It was the first day off in a long time, and about 130 of us were trying to get a little rest and relaxation out by the pool in this very modern hotel that looked kind of like a prison. If I had to call it anything I would call it a 'pleasure prison.' It was the kind of place you might come to on a package tour out of Bangkok."

The man is Spalding Gray, a 45-year-old performance artist whose name—which is, by the way, real; Spalding has a brother named Channing—has been known for a decade among followers of experimental theater. The film, Swimming to Cambodia, which consists almost entirely of Gray sitting at the table and talking, brings to the screen for the first time a theatrical form that Gray has created—the epic monologue. For an hour and 28 minutes, Gray expatiates on the subject, more or less, of his involvement as a bit player in the production of the 1984 Roland Joffe film The Killing Fields. Shot in Thailand, The Killing Fields, based on an article that appeared in this magazine by a former Times reporter, Sydney H. Schanberg, focused on the genocidal aftermath of the occupation of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1975 by the brutal guerrilla group, Khmer Rouge. But Spalding Gray's monologue, with its elements of standup comedy, psychoanalytic free association and old-fashioned wrestling with conscience, ends up revealing its subject to be the monologist himself.

Directed by Jonathan Demme, who made Melvin and Howard, the Talking Heads rock-concert film Stop Making Sense and, most recently, Something Wild, and with a score by Laurie Anderson, Swimming to Cambodia will open Friday in New York and in at least 20 other cities within the next few weeks.

A critic for The Boston Phoenix once described Spalding Gray as "a Wasp Woody Allen, a spaced-out Norman Rockwell, a male Lily Tomlin," and The Minneapolis Star called him the "new wave Mark Twain." What makes Gray different from all of these figures is that he swears everything he says is true. "I'm interested in creative confession," he says. "I would have made a great Catholic."

Gray has been performing monologues since 1979, and a collection of them, reworked for print, Sex and Death to the Age 14, has been published in paperback by Vintage. But by almost all accounts, including his own, Swimming to Cambodia (also available in paperback, from Theater Communications Group) is his masterpiece. For more than two years, he has performed the piece around the country, including a three-month run at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. "I was spreading the word," he says. "The only way I could do it was me doing it. It's like a Johnny Appleseed thing. I went out across America and every place I made friends."

An associational, looping narrative that skips back and forth in time, Swimming to Cambodia is the story of one man learning to see himself in a larger context. Gray's subjects include and somehow connect the invasion of Cambodia, fights with his girlfriend Renée, the history and tradition of prostitution in Thailand, the killings at Kent State, disastrous Hollywood auditions, the American support of the former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and the nature and depth of liberal ideology. But most of all, the monologue is about what it's like to be Spalding Gray, a struggling New York actor affected both by the content of The Killing Fields and the glamour of being a pampered actor. His developing social conscience battles his career aspirations as he tries to decide, as he puts it, "whether to become a social worker for the Cambodians or to get a Hollywood agent."

As Gray tells it in the monologue, before The Killing Fields, he was fundamentally uninformed about recent history in Southeast Asia. "I'm not very political," he admits. "In fact, I've never even voted in my life." But being in the middle of a war movie forces Gray to bone up on the region's history; and he shares what he learns, in his quirky, pedantic way, with his audience. The film could be thought of as a whimsical high-school history class geared for adults, a session with Dear Spalding about America's relationship to Cambodia.

Gray owns up not only to high moral feelings, but also to the seductions of glamour and good food on the set. For Gray, there was more to Thailand than moral consciousness. When his stint on the film is complete, he ponders what he'll miss: "Farewell to the incredible free lunches under the circus tent with fresh meat flown in from America every day … Farewell to the Thai maid and the fresh, clean cotton sheets on the king-size bed. Farewell to the cakes and teas and ices at 4. Farewell to the single fresh rose in a vase on my bureau every morning in my hotel."

With its limited cast, essentially theatrical nature and Gray's penchant for digression, Swimming to Cambodia may evoke memories of director Louis Malle's 1982 film, My Dinner With Andre, or the 1961 screen version of Jack Gelber's play, The Connection. Yet it stands a chance of gaining a larger audience. The humor of the piece, Gray's stance as a willing innocent, struggling with a nascent social consciousness in the face of Hollywood's temptations, may, in fact, make the film closer to Richard Pryor's concert work.

Like Pryor, Gray introduce's odd, resonant characters, and through his canny ventriloquism, they seem to come more alive than if they were played by actors on the screen. We meet, for example, a young, hysterically bigoted Navy man named Jack Daniels, whom Gray once encountered on a train to Chicago. "He was cute enough," Gray says. "He was in his civvies, not his Navy outfit. The only kind of weird, demented thing about him was that his ears hadn't grown. They were like those little pasta shells. It was as if his body had grown but his ears hadn't caught up yet."

Then, red-faced and several keys lower, Gray does Jack Daniels, yelling his American jingoism in all its vivid profanity, and concluding, "I love the Navy, though. … I get to travel everywhere. I've been to India, Africa, Sweden. I … didn't like Africa, though. I don't know why, but black women just don't turn me on."

"Now here's a guy," Gray says, back in the narrator's voice, "if the women in the country don't turn him on, he misses the entire landscape."

"You won't believe this," Spalding-as-Jack confides, "The Russians don't even have electrical intercoms on their ships. They still speak through tubes!"

Spalding-as-narrator concludes: "Suddenly I had this enormous fondness for the Russian Navy, for the whole of Mother Russia. The thought of them speaking, like innocent children, through empty toilet-paper rolls, empty paper-towel rolls, where you could still hear confusion, doubt, envy, brotherly love, ambivalence. …"

Throughout, Swimming to Cambodia is political in just this way. Gray makes grand, inductive leaps to social and moral philosophy from isolated, personal experience. But if this sort of emotional testimony resonates with naïvete and even sentimentality, there is, nonetheless, considerable dramatic power in the monologue, which comes from Gray's seamless transitions between the ridiculous and the tragic. We are not far removed from the self-important Jack Daniels when suddenly we're hearing the beautifully simple and forthright words of Cambodia's Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, the text of a letter informing the American Ambassador in Phnom Penh that he will stay with his countrymen and not leave Cambodia with the Americans:

"You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it," it says in part. "You leave and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot, and in the country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must one day die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments."

"Five days later," Spalding-as-narrator says, plainly, "their livers were carried through the streets on sticks."

I've never been one to look out for the star role," Spalding Gray says. "I've always been a great supporting actor." He is sitting in the small communal dressing room at The Performing Garage, a theater space in the SoHo section of Manhattan that has been his home as an actor since 1970. The dressing room is dark, cluttered with old furniture. On the wall is a framed letter from Jacqueline Onassis to Gregory Mosher, the director of the Lincoln Center Theater, about Spalding Gray: "What a genius he is!"

Gray says he is happy with any role, however small, providing it furnishes sufficient inspiration to write about later. The monologues, he says, are the product of what he's always doing anyway, "reporting on my personal experiences. Journalism, I call it." Indeed, he seems extremely economical, using most of his professional and personal experiences twice, so to speak. He recently wrote a piece about his Christmas vacation in Miami. "Of course, that's my hope for dying," he says, "that I'll find the right medium and come back and write about it."

Gray's first monologues were created here, improvised in front of audiences at The Performing Garage. He still works improvisationally, starting with notes, talking his stories through and responding to the audience. Later, he'll use a tape recorder to refine and revise them. People who have seen Swimming to Cambodia on stage will find subtle changes in the film's text. No two performances have been duplicated. "Spontaneity and serendipity are the guiding principles of my life," Gray says.

If it weren't for the plaid shirt and sneakers and his somehow Balinese-like hand movements, Gray, who is tall, with patrician, silvering hair and balding a little in the back, would look like a middle-aged businessman in, say, insurance. He is a storyteller even when not on stage. Questions such as "What was your childhood like?" elicit long, spiraling answers, punctuated with actorlike pauses for laughter.

"I was born in Barrington, R.I.," Gray says quickly, "I was a quiet child, as my father said recently in an interview. It was very interesting because when they asked him was he surprised to see what I'd become, he said, 'Very! He was a quiet, backward boy!' He kept referring to me as a 'backward boy.'

"My mother has told me that when my cocker spaniel died, I stopped talking for months. They thought of taking me to a psychiatrist. I wouldn't push ahead in lines. I was dyslexic, didn't know it. Oh, everything was fine up until I was moved to the junior high school, and I think at that point I was overwhelmed by the 'others'—the kids from the other side of the tracks, the Italians, and by the fact that there were so many people in the world. I didn't have any girlfriends in high school and I was doing bad and I was a juvenile delinquent and I was failing everything and they sent me away to boarding school and that's when I got interested in theater. It was the only interest I ever had."

A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, Gray first got his Actors Equity card at the Alley Theater in Houston. But he felt disillusioned by the limitations of traditional theater. In the summer of 1967, he went off to live in Mexico. "I was really despondent because I wasn't facing the fact that my mother was breaking down for two years in Rhode Island," he says. "I'd been there for part of it, but I'd fled a good part of it to go to Houston. So that was a dreadful summer—I came back to find she had committed suicide without them being able to notify me. And then I moved to New York and tried to get back on the track."

During his first years in New York, Gray lived with the actress and director Elizabeth LeCompte, her sister and her sister's roommate on 6th Street and Avenue D. "I would spend the days, all day, walking New York, getting to know it," he says, and it's clear that he's talking about the birth of the monologist in him. "I'd come back at the end of the day and I'd fix dinner for them. I remember particularly chicken hearts and cheap red wine, that Spanish burgundy you could buy for 99 cents. And while I was fixing dinner I would just tell my whole day and they were a great audience."

Gray remembers that time as "turbulent. All that stuff was going on in the counter-culture, and I just felt like the real fear of insanity was upon me. I needed a haven." He found it at The Performing Garage, the home of The Performance Group, a theater collective that included many of the seminal forces in the experimental theater, including its founding director Richard Schechner and the actor Willem Dafoe, currently featured in Oliver Stone's film Platoon. Among other projects there, Gray played Hoss, the lead in the 1973 New York premiere production of Sam Shepard's play, Tooth of Crime.

"Talk about rhythms," Gray says. "That for me was one of the last operatic plays of Sam's, one of the last great ones, in which I'd step into that thing and never stop talking. It was the rhythms that carried me through. And I think that really opened me up and gave me this operatic sense of rhythm that I carry through into my own work."

Gray now lives with Renée Shafransky, a 33-year-old screenwriter and journalist whom he met in 1979 at the then-fashionable late-night club, Studio 54. Ms. Shafransky has been a major character in many of Gray's monologues; in Swimming to Cambodia, she is presented as something of a nag, trying to persuade Spalding to leave his paradise in Thailand and return to their house in the unfortunately named town of Krumville, N.Y. "She gave me an ultimatum," Gray says in the monologue. "'Either give me a date when you're coming home—or marry me.

Ms. Shafransky doesn't mind. "I know the truth behind the truth," she says. She signed release forms so her real name could be invoked in the film. And it was she who helped Gray trim the original monologue down to its filmable shape. (Gray remembers, "She would say, 'Lengthwise, I think the whorehouse scene is too long.'") But then, Ms. Shafransky, an animated, dark, Jewish beauty, sometimes returns the favor, as in the piece she wrote for The Village Voice about living with a Wasp, headlined "The Goy of Sex."

"My fantasy," says Ms. Shafransky, "is that our life is like Nick and Nora Charles, or Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman—all the great romantic sparring partners."

Not incidentally, Ms. Shafransky is also the producer of the film of Swimming to Cambodia. In the fall of 1984, Gray was approached by someone who called himself a fan and a producer. "I sort of trusted him because he wore L.L. Bean boots," Gray says. "But I did not trust his partner. We went to this restaurant. And his partner kept jumping up to go to another table."

The alleged producer kept calling. "But it didn't feel right," Gray continues. "And Renée said, 'If there's going to be a film made of this, why don't you choose the director and producer? Or I'll produce it. You choose the director.'"

Gray had just seen Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads film that Jonathan Demme had directed. "I thought it was a good example of a director's ego being very much out of the material," he says. "And I'd been acquainted with Jonathan, too, socially. So I called him and he had seen the monologue and he was immediately responsive. That was over two years ago. It's taken that long to get the money and the distributor balanced. We'd get a distributor, we'd lose the money. Renée could do a whole monologue on the money that has come and gone. One of the most ridiculous stories was why we went to Florida for Christmas—to meet with a guy who had washing machines in Miami, laundromats."

In the end, it was independent producers Lewis Allen and Peter Newman—"my white knights," Ms. Shafransky says—who provided initial funds for preproduction, and then secured a deal with Cinecom, a film distribution company, for full financing. Swimming to Cambodia was made for $400,000, a very low budget, by any standards. Allen and Newman receive screen credit as executive producers.

Already, Gray and Demme had mutual friends. Each had worked closely with the leader of the Talking Heads, David Byrne, Demme in Stop Making Sense, Gray as an actor in True Stories, the feature film Byrne wrote and directed. Both had been involved with the music of the performance artist Laurie Anderson.

Demme had first seen Gray perform years earlier, at a reading at the Public Theater in New York. "I thought he was fantastic," Demme says. He was "deeply flattered" to be asked to direct Swimming to Cambodia.

Demme's directorial vision in Swimming to Cambodia is oddly subdued. In feature films like Melvin and Howard and Something Wild, his style had been markedly idiosyncratic. But this show is always Spalding's. There are few cuts or oblique angles; the camera tends to view Spalding straightforwardly, face front. Even short inserts of footage from The Killing Fields, and Laurie Anderson's percussive, beautiful score with its hints of Asian melodies and some briefly emphatic visual effects, don't seriously diminish the camera's apparent reverence for the monologist. In fact, the most identifiable touch of pure Demme can be seen in the syncopated, hip, color credits. Of his plain style, Demme says, simply: "It's a perfect collaboration. A love affair."

"It's a documentary of me," Gray says, in a low voice, with some conscious irony. Though the film will bring his work to a larger audience than it's ever had, he still considers it a byproduct of his live monologues. In them, he says: "I am always working my audience. I am working to keep them attentive and awake, just like a good minister would do in a Puritan church in a long Sunday session. If I see someone nodding, dozing, I will begin to address them to energize them with my voice and presence. I've had very few walkouts ever—maybe there was one at Lincoln Center. Someone gets up and it's the most obscene gesture possible. It almost makes me not able to go on."

At a French restaurant a few blocks from The Performing Garage, Spalding and Renée order steaks and joke about making a film called The Big Break, a spoof on the mythology of luck and success. In a low, husky voice, Renée intones, "The chances were one in a million, but through hard, hard work and a combination of luck, circumstance and …"

Much of Spalding's work has been about missed chances, the underside of the Horatio Alger story, but these days plenty of opportunities are turning up.

"Lincoln Center made enormous changes in my life," Gray says.

"It's only in the past two years that he's been able to make a real living doing what he wants," says Renée.

Currently, Gray is filming a second movie monologue, this time for Home Box Office, a version of his Terrors of Pleasure, about the disasters attendant to his purchase of a house in the country. The working title for his next major project is L.A.—The Other. Gray will go into Los Angeles ghettos—the barrio, Watts, one Asian community and the San Fernando Valley ("a ghetto of sorts," Gray says)—and try to discover and work with local storytellers. The results—"I was going to call it a talent show, but I just want people to tell their own stories"—will be staged next fall at the Taper, Too, a satellite facility of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

As Renée borrows his knife, Spalding takes out a package of The Three Castles, a mild Virginian tobacco. He rolls himself a cigarette and confides his real wish, which is to work with that other quintessential monologist, Woody Allen. "It's the only project I'm really interested in," Gray says. "I met him once in an audition for 'The Happy-Sad Train'"—a reference to a scene from Allen's film, Stardust Memories.

He lights up, inhales. "I smoke one a day," he says. "I love Woody Allen."

Finally, Gray is also writing, for print, not performance. "I'm working on what looks like my autobiography," he says. "And I'm determined that it's not to be spoken. It's based, really, on how I've theatricalized my life. I thought it was about my mother's suicide but the suicide seems to be like Brueghel's Icarus. Icarus is falling into the water, everyone's going on doing their tasks around him and it's one incident in the landscape."

Much of the book-in-progress is, apparently, about sex. It has been the subject of some debate at home. Renée would like to see him begin to fictionalize. "So far," she reports, "he's holding out. He feels he has to write what he needs to write. So I'm going to let him write it, and then we'll see."

The two have found a buyer for the troublesome Terrors of Pleasure house and bought another one in upstate New York. They plan to live and work there part of every year. "Sane comfort," Gray says. "Something that's not provocative on an absurdist level. The final house, a real house. There won't be any story in it."

"It's the first normal thing we've ever done," Ms. Shafransky says.

Marriage does not seem to be an issue for them. When the subject of children comes up, however, a loud squabble breaks out. Shortly, though, the disagreement subsides, and Renée kisses him on the ear.

"I always figured I could do a great monologue about having a kid," Gray concedes.

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