SOURCE: "A New Face in Graver's Corners," in The New York Times, December 4, 1988, pp. 1, 10.

[In the following essay, Rothstein discusses Gray's artistic motivations and involvement in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town.]

Thornton Wilder, in his 1957 preface to "Three Plays":

"Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death {that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory). It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place. The recurrent words in this play (few have noticed it) are 'hundreds,' 'thousands,' and 'millions.' Emily's joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday presents—what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living, and who will live? Each individual's assertion to an absolute reality can be only inner, very inner."

The doorbell in the street is usually anonymous, but this morning a 47-year-old resident of the SoHo section of Manhattan has scribbled something to its right to provide a guide for a visitor.

"S. Gray," says the scrawl on the wall. The visitor rings the doorbell and waits as S. Gray races down four flights of stairs to open the door to the loft building where he lives. It is just down the street from the Performing Garage, where, first with the Performance Group and then with the Wooster Group, Spalding Gray performed and began creating the monologues for which he is best known.

Now the author of Sex and Death to the Age 14, Terrors of Pleasure and Swimming to Cambodia has taken on a new role—that of the Stage Manager in Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. The 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the residents of Grover's Corners, N. H. … is directed by Gregory Mosher and has a cast of 27, including Penelope Ann Miller, Eric Stoltz, James Rebhorn and Frances Conroy. It is, Mr. Gray says, his first major role in a play since he was Hoss in Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime at the Performing Garage in 1974.

"When I was mulling over whether to do it, my girlfriend, Renée Shafransky, was playing devil's advocate," Mr. Gray recalls. "So she says to me, 'How are they going to do Our Town in Calcutta?' She was referring to New York City as Calcutta, because that's how we've been experiencing it."

He is seated at a bare wooden table next to a rear window in his apartment. It is a table not unlike the ones he has used in his monologues, and from time to time he will lean forward, elbows on the table, just as he does on stage. "At first I said no to Greg," Mr. Gray says.

And he said, "Think it over for the day and call me back tonight." And I had said "No" because of the book I'm working on. It's a hardcover, autobiographic novel, and I was very anxious about it. So I went off for a walk to think it over. I always walk up to Barnes & Noble, on 18th Street—I have to have a point of reference to go to. And then I look at all the books on sale. I like to look at all the books on sale.

And there was this guy outside. I always carry change with me and give it out, and this guy had such a sad story. He had had his head bashed in in San Francisco, and had been in a veterans' hospital, and he left prematurely, and he had no place to stay. And I thought, "No, I can't do Our Town. This is the answer. I must work with the homeless."

And I went back all inspired. I thought I was going to go up to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. And then I thought, "No, no, my talent is around the theater." And I know that doing this piece is in some way going to be important. In some way, this will create a dramatic dynamic between what is going on outside and what is going on on the stage; between the order of the theater and the absolute chaos of the streets.

His visitor asks for an example. "I don't think it's clear to me yet," he says.

It's evolving. But when I came to work the first day, there were people dealing crack in the stage entrance, because no one had used the theater for such a long time. They had a suitcase open and they had bags the size of a hardcover book filled with what looked like rock candy. And I said, "Excuse me," and I stepped over the suitcase. I said, "I'm going to work now." They're not there anymore, because people are coming and the whole thing's alive. But they were there then.

Sex and Discipline to the Age 21

Mr. Mosher, the play's director and the director of Lincoln Center Theater, has brought to this production his personal view of the work. It is a view that closely relates the play to the vision of Samuel Beckett, and especially to one line from Waiting for Godot: "… they are born astride the grave."

"Somehow, in the 50's and 60's, the play was turned into a Hallmark card," Mr. Mosher recalled earlier this fall, on the day he announced that Mr. Gray had joined the cast. "It was reduced, not necessarily by anyone doing anything, but by a consensus that it was a superficial, nostalgic, flag-waving poem to a lost America.

"On the contrary," he said, "I think it's a very particular vision of what life in this century has been. The first act begins in 1901 and projects out into the future about the deepest sort of spiritual concerns that people have. It's a magnificent play to be doing side by side with Godot.

"They were written 10 years apart," he said—Godot was completed in 1948—"and while Beckett's vision is certainly a darker one, there's a searching in Thornton Wilder's play that simply can't exist when it's performed in a high school theater, as it often is. The students don't know about death, about dying in childbirth. There's that most famous line in Godot about being born astride the grave. And here in Our Town there's the most beautiful girl in the world giving birth and dying in childbirth."

Mr. Gray acknowledges the Beckett influence on the production. But he says that he has his own, very different, connections to the play. "Certainly that Beckett imagery is there," he says.

But I don't relate to it as much as Gregory does. Beckett is not a favorite writer of mine, and Godot is not a favorite play.

I would say that the kind of existential angst that Beckett has is mildly there. But there's something else—a kind of spirituality. There are hints of New England metaphysical Hinduism and Buddhism, as in Thoreau and Emerson. My first take on the play, and I still hold it, is that it's a New England graveyard meditation. It's a very heartfelt, dark piece, and, in this production, it's combined with a nice mix of lightness and humor.

Gertrude Stein is kind of my muse for the play…. I can hear her "Making of the Americans" in it, the way in which she repeats simple details about living. But Wilder is more condensed. And almost certainly there's the way Hemingway was influenced by her. They were trying to write the most uncomplicated sentences that would deliver the most information. It reminds me of dense Zen haikus, where they go on and on and on, but it's always nondelving nonpsychological, nonpsychoanalytic. It's clean surface statements that what you're seeing is what exists and all that exists beyond that is in your imagination, and mine.

Mr. Gray's connections to the play are related to his childhood, he says—to his birth in Barrington, R.I., and to his memories of growing up in New England, a New England 40 years after the time of Our Town.

"I refer to Our Town as the tip of the iceberg," he says.

My book, my autobiographic novel, is the bottom. The book is like a parallel to Peyton Place, because it shows the more seamy, sordid side of New England, of why I left, of why I was driven out of it, and all the repressive aspects of it.

When I see some of the scenes in the play,… I think about going to the Christian Science Sunday school, which you had to go to until you were 21, if you made it that far. These are associations I have while watching the play, and I watch it every night from the wings. I don't ever leave the presence of the play. I don't go to my dressing room, because I always want to know what I'm coming into when I come in as the Stage Manager—the energy field.

I can remember my Sunday school teacher seeing me playing with my hands while I was listening, maybe nervously, and then him slapping my hands and saying, "We don't need that kind of distraction here." And I put my hands down, and then somewhere in the middle of the class, the same class, he got up and went over to the clock on the wall, an old pendulum clock, and he stopped it. And he said, "We don't need this kind of distraction either."

And the other thing that I remember is when my mother found all my pinups behind my door—Marilyn Monroe included, that naked shot of her on red satin. I had put them on the back of my door so that she'd never see them, but she went to dust behind the door, and she took them and put them all out on the coffee table down in the sun room. And she gave me a long lecture about how these would give me disturbing thoughts, bad thoughts.

So I think of that,… for instance, in the scene between Emily and her mother. When her mother says, Emily, "you're pretty enough for all normal purposes," I see this enormous New England repression around the idea of glorification of beauty. It's a wonderful line. It just brings home all of that puritanical stuff. It's the darker side, the one I always wanted to bust out of. It was meant to keep you in your place. The Australians call it the "tall poppy theory"—if you get too uppity, if you stand out too much, they cut you down.

But it had its good side too, he adds—"in the sense that it was always concerned with the enjoyment of very simple details, the Shaker aspect, the simple life.

"Wilder was writing it at the Macdowell Colony," he says, "and I was up there in March, so when I say the speech about the White Mountains I'm really seeing them, and it helps the connection. And I had climbed in the White Mountains—I climbed Mount Washington when I was 15 years old. It was the first mountain I climbed. So these connections mean much more to me than the Beckett one."

The Terrors of Performing

The play has in it something that he had not been in touch with for a while, Mr. Gray says.

It's a simple sense of heartfeltness. Taken over the edge, it would be sentiment, but we're not playing it that way. I don't think the play is a sentimental play, and I think the Stage Manager's role is to step in and cut the sentiment when it's right on the edge. I think of the Stage Manager as a kind of go-between between the audience and the piece. He interrupts all the scenes just before they can go into another realm—he brings it back to the point where he is saying, "This is a play we're doing." What I love about Our Town is I'm always saying that this is a play, and this convention feels good to me, because it's in a way working behind the scenes, which is the way I've always worked—telling the story under the story. When I'm trying to focus on "A," I think of "K."

But amid the love, there is a problem. "It's been a real project not to comment on what's going on around the production," he says—"which is the construction of a very large building right next door," at Broadway and 45th Street.

"We've canceled Wednesday matinees now," he says, "because of that. But last Wednesday was a very interesting and memorable experience.

The workers were supposed to stop at 3 o'clock—that was the agreement they had with the Shubert Organization. Well, at 3 o'clock, it got worse. So in the middle of these incredible scenes there were these wonderful juxtapositions. It reminded me of when I first came to New York City, in 1967, and I went to see Merce Cunningham at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Before the dance began, they said that they had no soundtrack, that the soundtrack was what's going on outside the Academy—the street sounds. As soon as they directed our attention there, of course, we accepted it and paid attention to it—it was a wonderful kind of John Cagean concept.

So here's this scene going on between Eric Stoltz—George Gibbs—and Jim Rebhorn, who plays his father, Doc Gibbs. They're talking about how the mother was cutting wood, how Doc Gibbs heard her cutting wood that morning, and how George should help his mother. And all you could hear was these buzz-saws cutting wood right next door—a big, big, ZZZZZZZEW, ZZZZZZZEW. And I thought, I hope it's quiet by the time we get to the cemetery and Emily's last speech.

Because I remembered that one night—there are no buildings next to the Lyceum now, so you can hear the sirens—and one night Emily was doing that "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you" speech, and there was full gridlock: sirens, police, ambulances.

Could all this be grist for a future monologue?

"Every monologue I've ever done was serendipitous," he says, "and came out of what I call a kind of leftover energy—things that weren't resolved, things that stood out, things that needed to be talked out to be understood. And they were always whatever I entered in my journal. And then I'll start to put together a fabric. I think that the next monologue is going to be very broad, and cover a lot of territory. It will be catching-up-with-what-has-happened-since-I've-last-spo-ken-to-you. Though Eric Stoltz is totally on guard about everything he says, because we share this dressing room."

He pauses and thinks for a moment. "I often think of the Lyceum Theater, when we're in it—and we've been in it a lot," he says, "as this huge, old cruise ship, going nowhere, in which the entire crew is condemned to perform Our Town every night. It's a strange experience, being with all these people and doing this piece, and I can't think that there won't be stories coming out of it."

The Killing Fields

"I'm thinking about Washington," Mr. Gray says. "I think that I'm going to move down there in the spring and begin to try to figure out what is going on there politically, because it's a foreign land to me. And I dislike it."

He pauses briefly. Onstage, he would probably take a sip of water. But there is no water on the table. "And this is why I want to go to Washington," he says.

Because I feel that if there's any juxtaposition between this play and the world outside, it's how far we've come from the original ideals, the ideals of our forefathers.

When I look at America now, I see a series of feudal states, feudal cities. You have your entertainment capital, in Los Angeles, your house of illusions; you have your drug city, in Miami; you have your bureaucratic law, lingo, policy-destroying-making city, Washington; you have the city of intellect and finance; you have the conservative breadbasket. You're so blown away now, and so dependent on media and press, which is the one unifier. And it makes me want to flee to Our Town.

And so my bone-chilling line in the play, as someone called it, is when I say: "Over there are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves … New Hampshire boys … had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they'd never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends—the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it."

"And every night that has a different reading for me," he says. "And a different meaning. I just let it hang there, as a meditation, on what is the United States of America. And the juxtaposition is between what we were, or what we thought we were, as Americans, and what we are—and between what we might have been and what we are."