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The Art of Autobiography: An Interview with Spalding Gray

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SOURCE: "The Art of Autobiography: An Interview with Spalding Gray," in Cineaste, Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 34-7.

[In the following interview, Gray discusses the production of his stage and film performances, the evolution of his monologues, and his literary influences.]

In many respects, the success of the film adaptations of two of Spalding Gray's more crowd-pleasing monologues, Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia (1987) and Nick Broomfield's Monster in a Box (1992), represents the ongoing 'mainstreaming' of portions of the downtown New York avant-garde, a trend which could also be observed in the solo film debuts of performers such as Laurie Anderson and Eric Bogosian. Yet, unlike Anderson or Bogosian, autobiography is Gray's chosen genre, and this choice has been both the source of Gray's appeal and the source of confusion. Autobiography can be naively understood as pure self-revelation, or more cannily recognized as cleverly wrought subterfuge. Gray's unabashedly autobiographical monologues seem like uncensored emotional outpourings, but are actually the result of carefully calculated artifice. The monologues' sudden shifts in tone from uproarious comedy to unmitigated anguish have stymied critics who, rather clumsily, compared Gray to such unlikely precursors as Mark Twain and Frank Harris. While realizing the risk of attempting similarly farfetched analogies, it might be said that Gray tempers the down-to-earth irony of humorists such as Jean Shepherd and Garrison Keillor with a manic-depressive lyricism that resembles the confessional zeal of his fellow New Englander, Robert Lowell.

Both Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box integrate what would otherwise be a somewhat random series of ruminations into a decidedly comic picaresque structure. In the following interview, Gray acknowledges his debt to Jack Kerouac's version of the roman a clef, although in the monologues, unlike On the Road, there is no attempt to invent fictitious names for recurring characters such as film director Roland Joffe, Gray's wife Renee Shafransky (once a programmer at the late, lamented Collective for Living Cinema in New York), and, of course, 'Spalding' himself. The reference to Kerouac is a reminder of the fact that Gray has distinctly countercultural roots that become glaringly obvious when his past affiliation with Richard Schechner's Performance Group and Elizabeth LeCompte's Wooster Group is considered. The Performance Group shared the overtly Dionysian orientation of avant-garde theater during the late Sixties and early Seventies. The Wooster Group, a theatrical collective that promoted a somewhat more introspective esthetic, fueled their self-anointed "decon-structions" of hallowed theatrical texts such as The Cocktail Party with an anarchic spirit that was indebted at least as much to Lenny Bruce as to Artaud and Grotowski. Gray and LeCompte's trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island, was the launching pad for many of Gray's subsequent autobiographical musings, although the somber tone of a performance piece such as Rumstick Road (the suicide of Gray's mother was the piece's departure point) contrasts sharply with the comic buoyancy of the later monologues, a cycle initiated at New York's Performing Garage with Sex and Death to the Age 14.

Spalding Gray has become something of a cottage industry, since his staged monologues have spawned published transcripts and compact discs as well as films. The 'monster' of Monster in a Box is, of course, a novel (Impossible Vacation, 1992) that borrows heavily from recollections previously featured in numerous monologues. Gray likes to emphasize that he is primarily an actor, although he has not always warmed to the roles doled out to him in lackluster Hollywood films such as Stars and Bars and Beaches. When Cineaste talked to Gray last fall, he seemed considerably more excited about his work in two soon-to-be-released features—Paul Mazursky's The Pickle and Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill.

[Cineaste:] Moving a piece conceived for the stage to film often involves opening up the material in some way. Neither Swimming to Cambodia nor Monster in a Box adopts that strategy, yet they are more than just filmed performances.

[Spalding Gray:] What I did in both cases, with Jonathan Demme and Nick Broomfield, was to give over to their knowledge of film and the way they wanted to put it together. It was never my idea to put them on film. I always knew they worked best live. But I also knew and absolutely discovered after Swimming the value of putting them on film. It's less expensive to see, so you get an audience that cannot afford a theater ticket. Second, you get an audience that would never go to the theater at all, but which does go to the movies. The surprising thing that happened in retrospect is that because the film is so minimal, because there are no cutaways, the audience is required to make their own film. That's not to say that doesn't happen in the theater, but it happens differently in the movie theater. I think you come to film with certain expectations and conditioning. You have seen so many movies before that offer a kind of literal representation of reality. When it's not there, there is the motivation for the audience to make self-cinema.

Nick seems more or less to have followed Jonathan's formulas. The film is made from three performances and some pickup shots at a fourth session. It was a simple setup. We had three 35mm cameras. The idea was to have the cameras going at all times so I wouldn't have to interrupt the performance and break the flow. That was very important to me. I couldn't see breaking the flow. That's one of my objections to film acting, particularly when you have a running theme. So the film magazines were being changed all the time by runners. The pickup shots were things we couldn't get during the performances. We had one afternoon of that for Monster. Before that we had three whole performances shot with a live audience.

The idea of having a live audience was essential for me. I learned this doing Swimming. The first two nights of filming I was looking past the camera to find the audience, because I felt so guilty. Jonathan's only comment was "be generous to the camera" and I came to realize that the camera was the audience. So when we shot Monster, I informed the audience beforehand. I went out and thanked them for coming and told them that they would be looking at me looking at a camera and I hoped that would be interesting for them.

I like working with cameras but I prefer having an audience present. The best commercial example of that was recently when I did a small role with Dolly Parton in Straight Talk. We had to do it in front of a small studio audience in Chicago. When I was talking with Dolly I was supposed to be a guest on a live TV show. I could just feel the difference in the way Dolly responded and was energized.

Do you now have the sense that, with the piece on film, you need never perform it again?

Well, I can't do it for quite some time. That's in the contract. I'm thankful for that. In both cases I needed to have someone put their hand over my mouth because I didn't want to go on doing it, yet I could book it again and again. You go crazy at the idea of turning down a lucrative offer and you just do it. So the films saved me. The recent film shut me up and now I'm open again which is terrifying but productive. Before the films I always had the notion that people would stop me in the street and say I'd lost it. I'd be able to let it go at that point. It would be like dying. There would be no problem.

But in regard to your question about the form of the films, I think they are radical in the sense that they demonstrate that a talking head can be interesting. When I first started doing monologues, a guy at PBS who had a grant to do a film on storytellers asked me, "What are you going to do with your head?" What kind of cutaways did I suggest? I said, "Just keep the story going." He said, "We can't do that. That's a no-no." When I was doing Swimming in Los Angeles, I had film people calling me all the time to get it on tape. No contracts were offered. They just wanted to preserve it. So Renee thought, "Why don't we keep it in the family? I'll produce and you can choose a director." I got Jonathan, but it took two years to get the $400,000 needed to do it. The whole thing started with the film culture of L.A.

Your third monologue-like film, Terrors of Pleasure, had cutaways rather than just the talking head.

I would call that a comic interlude. It came between Swimming and Monster. It was done for HBO. I was annoyed with them because they cut out a whole half hour, but I didn't fight for it. I was excited that they were doing it at all and paying me so well. The director wanted to do something different than what Jonathan had done with Swimming. I allowed him to do cutaways, but I don't think it works. I think the cutaways distract the audience and make them ask, "Why not a movie?" They seem random to me. Of course, some of them are very funny. I would have liked to have done that as a genuine film with all the real people playing themselves.

The essence of your monologues is that they are constantly changing. Putting them on film seems to be a way of having your cake and eating it, too.

That's right. Monster was in the can for a year before it was released. The amount of changes that occurred through natural evolution was so enormous that, when I saw the film, I thought that if I were leaching a class I would use the film and then show a tape of a recent performance and just look at the differences. I'd see how it had changed its colors, its subtleties, its details, its rhythms. My monologues are not prewritten. They are developed with audiences. The new one has been done four times. It's still struggling to get information across in logical order. When you begin to know the information, you can play with it and comment on it and reflect on it and then you can turn it into music and begin to play all the rhythms. The last stage is getting the phrasing, like, "The banana being shot across the room almost hit me in the eye." "… almost hit an Australian housewife in the eye." "… almost hit me in the head." "… shot across the wall." "… stuck." "… slid down the wall." "… stopped and was instantly devoured by an army of giant cockroaches." You play phrases like a jazz musician might. It would never be there the first night. There would just be the struggle of telling a story.

Along the same lines I've noted the huge discrepancy between the novel Impossible Vacation and Monster in a Box. The novel only went through eight rewrites. That's all I could deal with. But the monologue has been rewritten a hundred times because every performance is a rewrite. The audience doesn't know that. It knows what it sees, and what it sees is not a rewrite, it's what the monologue is at that point. My process is to tape for the first three performances and then listen and listen and, after that, it begins to swing.

To make a monologue is a long process. That's why I'm resisting moving into this new one. I just don't want to get rolling in it too fast. One of my problems with it is that it's about my eye operation. I've now gotten adjusted to the way my eye is. So I have to go back and remember how I was feeling at the time and then act. When I'm working with existing reality or dealing with insecurity or chaos, that's an ongoing thing with me, it's nothing I have to do a lot of emotional recall about. The eye operation and the conditions leading up to it are over, so that's different intellectual and emotional process.

You've had a lot of negative things to say about most of your acting in films.

Well, I'm very pleased with one that I've just been involved with, so I can speak about that. I've just finished shooting King of the Hill with Steven Soderbergh. This is a big breakthrough for me, because Steven is the first person who has not cast me as a professional WASP or as a doctor. I think I have a problem in Hollywood because in the monologues I said the only reason to do a Hollywood film is for the health insurance. So the producers said, "Fuck him. We'll make him a doctor for the rest of his life." In Paul Mazursky's The Pickle, I am a doctor who goes into the Ritz Hotel to help Danny Aiello. Now, Paul has a great sense of humor and gave me a small doctor's card that reads, "Edward Spalding, M.D." What a beautiful in-joke! I get to rush in, open the door, and say, "Hello. I'm Doctor Spalding. Where's the patient?" My fans will roar and the rest of the audience won't get it.

But this new role in King of the Hill is different. I'm a real character named Mr. Mungo. The film deals with a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in the Great Depression. He lives in a hotel and has all these kinky neighbors, of which I am one. I've been successful at one point but I've declined. I wear linen suits with suspenders and hang out with the local prostitute. I'm always looking for cigar bands for the kid and I also get him to do whiskey runs for me. Eventually I kill myself by slitting my wrists in the sink. Blood and water run out under the door. Soderbergh pretty much shot in sequence and works very fast. The other good thing for me was that he wasn't giving me a lot of notes. He let me figure it out myself. I was ten days in St. Louis in the middle of August in a Hyatt Hotel located in a mall. When you opened the windows, you saw the mall. That was the air you were breathing. Believe me, by the time my scenes were shot, I was very disturbed.

Then I feared I had overacted. After the last setup, I rushed to go to the airport, but then I got so worried I told the taxi driver to take me back. I had to see the dailies. I was pleased to see that I had made a real character. It was me, but it was a soulful, sad part of myself that was coming through, the suicidal side, all the stuff that Steven allowed to surface by choosing me. And I was his first choice which I'd never had happen before. I asked him why he chose me. He said, "Mungo is ruled by regret." I asked how he knew that about me. He replied, "Your novel." So I got cast through my book.

I'm definitely ready to act again. I've been given the script of And the Band Played On. They were so vague with me that they said, "Tell us what role you want to play." Well, there are a hundred gay men and a hundred doctors, so what choice have I got? I'm going to be a doctor again.

How would you compare yourself with other performance artists who have gone into film? Eric Bogosian comes to mind, but Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg might be other examples.

First of all, I don't think of myself as a performance artist. Artist I am not. I am a humorist. I don't think many artists have a good sense of humor. I do first person narratives. There are very few people doing that. Wally Shawn is one and Josh Mostel is directing a guy from San Francisco doing Red Diaper Baby, and those are fairly true stories. Lily and Whoopi don't do monologues. They do cabaret acts as characters. I like that kind of work. I like Bogosian's work, but he does not get up and say, "I'm Eric Bogosian and this is what I'm going through in my life." There are very few critics who make these distinctions. They call everything a one-person show.

The other thing to remember is that I was trained as an actor. Bob Dylan used to say, "I may look like Robert Frost, but I feel like Jesse James." I say I may look like the American Ambassador's aide, a pediatrician, or a gynecologist, but I feel just like Woody Allen. I have all this stuff inside which isn't what my face is. Hollywood is always seeing the WASP. They cast from image. But I've been in fifty plays. Paul Mazursky told me he thought I was a very good actor but what I ought to do was the John Cheever Story. I said, "Sure. You direct and we'll raise the money on my name. We'll sell the story to the American public as the bisexual, alcoholic writer by the Hudson." I was being very facetious. But that's America. Hardly any films, just movies.

You could be a great CIA man.

Odd you should say that. I was just in Iowa with my agent and he kept telling me what a great CIA man I could play. I said, "That is just what I do not want to do. I want something with heart in it. I don't want to play a cold, straight CIA man." He said it would be a CIA man who sees the light, but those films don't come very often and, when they do, they hire someone from the club, someone like William Hurt.

But this can be a silly business. Two years ago my agent got word that Woody Allen wanted to audition me. I was told not to bring lunch as I'd probably be in there for thirty seconds. Renee said that, "Whatever you do, act cool, he'll want you if you're a cold, withholding WASP." But I don't want that. I don't want to be Sam Waterston. Anyway, I got there and Woody comes over looking like a pale mole. He said, "I saw your picture and I just wanted to see you in person. I'm doing a new film." He won't tell you more than that. I thought he had seen a photograph of me, but he was using the old term for movies. I said, "But did you see Swimming to Cambodia?" He said, "Yeah, I saw your picture and I wanted to see you." Withhold, withhold, withhold. So I turned in a circle and said, "Well, now I've seen your picture and I've seen you," and I left. I went outside to sit in the lobby to see how long other people were going to be in there. A minute was about the average. I came home and Renee asked what I had done. I said, "I just turned around." She said that most people did that. They turned around. Rotated.

How much of the Spalding Gray of the monologues and the 'pictures' is the real Spalding Gray?

Up until recently I'd have compared myself to Woody Allen. I have an enormous sense of humor in a public space and I can make people laugh. I help people laugh. But I don't laugh a lot myself. I'm rather morbid and have a somewhat depressive nature. I read heavy books to get to sleep. So there is a kind of taciturn, not really open person, a rigid New Englander who wishes he had been on Ken Kesey's bus but knows he would have been kicked out. I'm a Gemini. Split. The name Spalding in Old English means a meadow cleft by a spring.

I'm one thing on stage and some people think I'm like that all the time. A short time ago, I was honored at a party in Southampton. About seventeen people came. I don't know if I was supposed to be the Belle of the Ball, but I barely spoke. People are usually surprised by that. But that's how I am unless I have a lot to drink. Then I can get very loquacious. There is the extroverted side, the me of the performances, and then the me who retreats and listens and tries to get in touch with what is going on. I have to take things in. I'm not like Robin Williams. As soon as he perceives, he responds. He's right in the groove, just like that. I've been around him enough to have seen that. That's a big difference between us.

How did the Spalding Gray of the performances come into being?

The first confessional monologue was in 1971 with the Performance Group. Each of us was asked to go to a member of the audience and tell them a personal story about death. The immediate reference was the My Lai massacre which the director was trying to personalize. I whispered the story of my mother's suicide in Mexico in 1967 when I came home and found my mother's ashes and a note in a box on my father's bed. That's now in the novel and in Monster and it was the germ of my first active address.

The breakthrough came in 1977 when I was in the Wooster Group. I was able to get up and say, "My name is Spalding Gray. Spalding 'Spud' Gray. This is what happened to me and this is my house in Barrington, Rhode Island." Then the slide came up. A year later I had to get away from the Group. I rode a Greyhound bus across America. You could go coast to coast for $69 and get on and off as often as you liked. I was in Boulder at a cafe where people were all doing their version of Jack Kerouac's prose poetry. I knew I had to get up. I just had to. I had no idea what I would say. I got up and talked about everything that had happened to me since I left New York on the Greyhound and arrived in Boulder. Then I just got out of there. That was the first monologue outside of the Performance Group.

The confessional voice in American literature is often traced to writers like Walt Whitman and Henry Miller. Did they have any impact on you?

Whitman is a bit too romantic for me. I prefer Robert Lowell. He's more existential. The tortured, alcoholic, overbred Irish Setter. I felt threatened by Miller. I've had to read him again, but I was left thinking he was boasting too much. He wouldn't show his vulnerability the way Kerouac would. He was not an anti-hero but a braggart. Miller's writing is like Paul Theroux's My Secret History which I hated because Paul refused any doubt about his sexuality.

You've referred to Kerouac often. Were there other influences from that time? It was a period when we relearned that poetry was something to be spoken, not just silently read.

I am a fan of the spoken word. When I listen to authors on tape I can visualize better than when I'm just reading the words. In college I didn't read Shakespeare, I listened to the plays on records. I listened to Dylan Thomas every night. I let it wash over me. Ginsberg was a great influence, but Kaddish, not Howl. I had a photograph of Kerouac on my wall and a friend of mine took a photograph of me reading Howl. I liked listening to cantors. There was also a jazz influence. I collect jazz. On the Road was one of the first books I ever sat down to read. What I liked was that he was alive. He had voice. All of that became clear to me when I was working on my novel at the McDowell Colony. I found that I was working from memory and I'm not that kind of writer. I'm not one of those guys who's read the complete works. I've read one or two things of authors I like.

What I came to understand in the late Seventies was that I wanted to control the whole thing—to be director, author, performer. I first formally tried that in 1979 after returning from the West. I speak rather than write. My words on a page are like everyone else's, but when you give it voice, it's different. The Spalding Gray of the monologues is a combination of Huckleberry Finn and Candide.

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