Spalding Gray walks onstage carrying a spiral notebook with a cartoon cover and wearing the kind of plaid cotton shirt that a nerd would button up to his Adam's apple. He sits at a table with a pull-down map behind him, as though he's about to give a class report. And he begins to talk, the words spilling out of him with the speed and candor of a precocious child. But there's nothing juvenile about his intricately crafted monologue, Swimming to Cambodia. A funny, moving soliloquy that Gray has been performing at Lincoln Center in New York, along with another monologue called Terrors of Pleasure, it manages in 100 minutes to sketch the history of Cambodian genocide, recount the filming of The Killing Fields (in which he had a part) and evoke a technicolor travelogue of paradise. It also provides a hilarious guided tour of Gray's neuroses (can't make a decision), fears (big ocean waves) and superstitions (turn off the radio only on a positive word). Don't worry, he's had professional help. His therapist, he notes, "was like a drinking buddy, but we never went drinking and I paid for all the drinks."

Gray is not, he insists, a performance artist, but an actor who comes to the theater each night and repeats certain actions and gestures. Whatever he is, he has reinvented the oral tradition. Unlike such solo performers as Lily Tomlin or Eric Bogosian, who present a gallery of personae, Gray plumbs just one character, himself. His material, all autobiographical, shows a great eye for detail, and he has a narrative gift for digressing and snaking neatly back to where he started.

In Cambodia, he threads in anecdotes about a nasty Manhattan neighbor or about sibling warfare at the Gray family dinner table, decades back in Barrington, R.I. He'll describe a man whose ears are so tiny they're like "pasta shells," or the T shirts the The Killing Fields crew wore one day that said, "Skip the Dialogue, Let's Blow Something Up." He'd rather not memorize the material; he checks his spiral notebook for an outline and cues, and every night he tries to spin the story as if for the first time.

One day last week Gray, 45, sat in the Performing Garage in SoHo, his artistic home since 1970, and talked about his route from nonnarrative group-theater experiments to his solo work today. Trained as an actor, he worked with Richard Schechner's Performance Group, and it helped him overcome a fear of direct contact with an audience. "There were no seats," he recalls. "The audience would be perched on the edge of the set, like at a golf match." Later, with the Wooster Group, he developed a trilogy of autobiographical pieces; the most powerful, Rumstick Road, was about his mother's suicide.

With his first monologue in 1979, Sex and Death to the Age of 14, he was on his way to becoming the WASP Woody Allen. "It was a form of associative self-analysis," he says. Like the conceptual artist who lived in a storefront window in public view and called it a work of art, Gray's esthetic was based on extreme personal exposure—but his was artfully crafted and full of humor.

Decisions, Decisions

Although his work will remain personal, Gray is interested in monologues about "something larger than my own neuroses." He's much too busy for therapy, anyway. He's starring in David Byrne's movie True Stories, which comes out in October; director Jonathan Demme will film Swimming to Cambodia in November for theatrical release. Vintage Books has published a collection of his monologues and he's booked on the David Letterman show. But he keeps facing decisions: should he take his show to Broadway or go to the Mark Taper Forum for an intriguing project to search for natural storytellers on the streets of Los Angeles? Whatever he ends up doing, he's sure to be taking notes. "I'll never run out of material as long as I live," he says. "The only disappointment is that I probably won't be able to come back after I die and tell that experience."