It's a Slippery Slope
[In the following review, Stone offers a generally unfavorable review of It's a Slippery Slope.]
Spalding Gray is our bard of self-absorption. He's learned to see it with detachment, turning it into a subject, a hot tub big enough for a group soak. In Monster in a Box, he found the measure of his talent: his eye for irony and incongruity; his capacity to show himself as vulnerable without undercutting the effect with aggression; his ability to weave story elements into charged arrangements, so that even details that at first seem random eventually gain significance. He presented his prurient, blabbermouth personality as the deviant spawn of his tight-lipped, undemonstrative, alcoholic WASP nest; the leakage that diminished him in childhood was transformed into comic strength.
The serious trouble chronicled in his next monologue, Gray's Anatomy, made him funnier. A retinal malady that threatened blindness to his left eye was like a discipline or calling. The blur was focusing. Training on a real infirmity rather than hypochondria, Gray entered a space cleared of self-importance and whining. He was naked and intimate, no membrane protecting him, so we were transported to his side of the eyeball. The sufferer was aware that his ordeal was enormous and ordinary, and he juggled these irreconcilables without dropping either.
His new piece, It's a Slippery Slope,… is a scrapbook of his narcissism, and damned if he doesn't deepen the gaze—at least for the first sixty minutes. Spalding is nearing 52, the age at which his mother committed suicide, and he's tempted to meet her in Valhalla. Instead he takes up skiing, exchanging his anxious, New York boho head trip for an in-the-moment flight from consciousness. On the mountain he's home, embracing his New England heritage, clambering up and slithering down the big mom-tit in the sky he has longed to join ever since mooning out the window of his high school geometry class.
The monologue is bravura stand-up unreeled with grand minimalism-his acting honed to a Beckettian simplicity that ripples out levels of meaning from a sip of water or the slight rearrangement of his feet beneath the desk at which he's stationed. His plaid shirt is as much clown garb as Bozo's red nose; his circumflex eyebrows shoot asides to the audience, like bubbles of thought above a cartoon character's head. His writing is spare as a haiku and galumphing as a shaggy dog, as he embellishes his themes: the laws of triangles, emotional depression and geological elevation, acting instead of living, the evasion of consequences.
Between monologues he wonders if he creates crises for material. He feels his life is becoming one big memory and that he's lost touch with sensation. He questions why each day he forgets that you only live once, while white-knuckling through existence dreading mortality. There are hilarious set pieces, among them a ski lesson in which he unprotestingly permits himself to be called Sterling. Cast as a suicide in a Soderbergh film, he strolls through his hotel with bloody makeup on his wrists and fails to get a rise out of anyone until, seized by a "diabolical 11-year-old Halloween energy," he waves them before an astonished old woman and cries, "Have you got anything for my wounds?" Classically stalled, conversations with his father are sporadic, but he reports one as the old man nears his end, a follow-up to their last chat, conducted on a golf course, when 14-year-old Spuddy was told the facts of life. Loosened by a couple of beers, Gray gropes for a Hallmark moment. "You had three sons, and I'm the middle. Why am I the only one who isn't circumcised?" Father: "You're not?" There is more dick-waving here than in previous works, and this is where the piece goes slack (or, if you prefer, plows into a snowdrift). We've been on the road with Spuddy for years, but those were the days when he was with his "girlfriend" (and later wife) Renee Shafransky, who was not only a character in his pieces but the director of several of them. He didn't confide, as he does now, that he used to have wild affairs on his tours. Unlike the "impingencies" of Monster in a Box, about a man who can't write a novel, and of Gray's Anatomy, about a man who may be going blind—both struggles with the self—the crisis at the core of Slippery Slope is Gray's affair with a woman who bears him a son and the subsequent dashing of his bond with Renee.
Faced with the consequences of his impact on others, Gray loses his thread. He stops spinning tales of fear and loathing—and psychobabblcs: "Renee and I fused, she became very involved with my work…. I had to propose to Renee in front of my therapist, who knew I was having an affair with Kathy…. Kathy was simple, she liked the outdoors…. Kathy had no leftover mothering energy." The unrealness of Renee to Spalding has fogged other narratives. Apart from being devoted to him and resourceful, she is always shadowy, instrumental to Spalding rather than palpable in her own right. At the end of Anatomy, when Renee presses to solidify their union with marriage, the gallant self-observer becomes a kvetch. Fear of aloneness and illness have made him passive, and in that state he has agreed to the wedding. Once he's through the operation, however, he wants to escape. This, too, could have been a subject: the way we make regrettable promises while feeling helpless. Instead he portrays himself as the reluctant bridegroom and casts Renee as the old ball and chain. In Slope, we can see why the marriage in Anatomy comes off false—he was still fucking Kathy!
But spilling the beans doesn't turn him honest. Renee's suffering is mentioned but not taken in by the narrator or presented to the audience. Gray has no impulse to protect the women. He admits that, over both of them, he chooses the mirror of himself he sees in his offspring—"There is always another woman, but never another son." Instead of satirizing this peak act of narcissism, Gray squanders the best chance thus far of his career and waxes reverential, declaring his boy a "little Archimedes [who] had the geometry to split up me and Renee." It's not a crime to love your kid, even to prefer him above others, but Gray speaks as if reproduction in itself is ennobling—redeems all that filthy stuff he was doing when it was just his dick and pleasure. Talk about returning to your Puritan roots.
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