Spalding Gray

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A review of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation

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SOURCE: A review of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation, in New Republic, July 6, 1992, pp. 26-8.

[In the following review, Kaufmann offers a mixed assessment of Monster in a Box and Impossible Vacation.]

Most of the comment about Spalding Gray, admiring though it rightly is, seems to me slightly skewed. He is praised for his heterodox, adventurous films, but that adventure of his begins in the theater. Why is Monster in a Box any more adventurous on film than it was on stage? (Likewise his previous film, Swimming to Cambodia.) It's assumed that Gray is more daring when he transfers his monologues to the screen because film demands greater visual variety than the theater and because film is inimical to language. Both of these assumptions are dubious (as plentiful examples show). To put it crassly, Gray runs just as much of a risk of tedium in the theater as he does on screen. The risks alter somewhat from one medium to another, but the success in the first venture emboldens the second.

Other one-person shows have been effectively transferred to film, Richard Pryor's and Lily Tomlin's, for prime instances, but Pryor deals in a series of riffs and Tomlin does a series of sketches. In thematically continuous, comic seriousness, I can think of only one forebear of Gray's work, Wallace Shawn's My Dinner with Andre, which, too, was done first in the theater by Shawn and Andre Gregory, then filmed under Louis Malle's direction. And this is a farfetched choice, of course, because next to Gray, Shawn's cast of two seems immense. But Gray, like Shawn, is earnestly funny and, above all else, articulate.

Gray sits before us at a desk—most of the time, anyway—as a companion, rather than a performer, not really old though with fluffy white hair, and recounts his adventures. He chooses where to begin, then (seemingly) free-associates for eighty-eight minutes. His previous monologue, Cambodia, was built around his engagement for a small role in The Killing Fields. This one is built around his signing with Knopf to write a novel. He has the monster 1,900-page manuscript on the desk, together with the box in which he carried the growing pile around, as he moved through New York, to Houston, to Hollywood, to the Soviet Union, to Nicaragua.

In all those places, Gray reveals himself as the sort of person to whom odd things happen; but then we see that the real difference between him and others is not really the oddity of the events but that he perceived them oddly and relishes them retrospectively. True, not many of us have been sent to Nicaragua by Columbia Pictures or have been engaged to play the Stage Manager in a Broadway production of Our Town, but he makes us feel that even if we had done those things, we wouldn't have picked the fruits of those experiences as he has done.

He begins by telling us blandly that, when his mother committed suicide in 1967, he was off vacationing in Mexico. That opening sets the key: a grim fact put in a bland context. A performer who was out only for boffos wouldn't have mentioned the suicide, and the way he mentions it relies on our understanding of why he gives those two facts almost equal weight. Further, the suicide, which comes up again later, serves as backdrop to this chronicle of a hip Candide.

The strongest elements in the piece is also the subtlest. If we ask what the purpose of the monologue is, what it really accomplishes, the answer is before us the whole time. What we are hearing about are some of the events that helped to create the person who is telling us this story.

Swimming to Cambodia was directed by Jonathan Demme, who did as little as possible, relying on Gray—writer and performer—to hold us. Demme's directing (as I recall) conceded very little to the specific difficulties posed for film by Gray's form. Nick Brumfield, however, who directed Monster, starts with an inferiority complex toward the theater and a constant need to prove that film can deal with the piece. Every time there's a chance for a sound effect—traffic, earthquake rumbles, whatever—Bromfield lays it on. Every time there's the slightest excuse for a lighting change, sometimes even when there isn't an excuse, Bromfield pounces. And with the editor, Graham Hutchings, he does a lot of that arbitrary cutting from one side to another that TV frets about, in order to avoid the "talking head" charge. When a head can talk as well as Gray's, why not leave it alone as much as you can? Why inflict on it the strictures derived from lesser heads?

Only one quibble about Gray. He performs his piece on a stage in front of an audience (though we see them only at the beginning), thus he talks to them throughout. But from time to time, he looks at the camera, which is especially noticeable when it's directly to his left or right where the audience could not be. These looks are small fractures of the theater effect. If they are supposed to make the film more cinematic, they have the opposite effect. They reveal a worry that Gray should have been above.

Note on the Monster. Gray's novel, the ostinato of his piece, is called Impossible Vacation, has been condensed to 228 pages, and has just been published. It's a peculiar experience. After seeing Gray on stage and screen, it was difficult merely to read the book: I kept hearing it. Like his monologues, it's a first-person narrative and is couched in his customary "voice." For some reason, he has changed the narrator's name to Brewster North, but there is every intent to have us think the book autobiographical, especially since a few episodes—including his mother's suicide—are much the same as in Monster in a Box.

From time to time, markedly in the boyhood sections, the writing is lovely. ("I remember being there in bed thinking, or imagining—because back then there was no difference between thinking and imagining …") Very often through the book, the tone is pure Gray—quiet joy at having discovered how to savor life's smaller opportunities as well as the larger ones.

Example: he is in a Zen retreat where the diet is only vegetables with brown rice. "I'd never had such a pure and intense taste sensation before. Original sin, I began to think, was not Adam eating the apple but Adam not eating it slowly enough really to enjoy it."

But the colors in the novel are quite different from the monologue. It's as if, when he was preparing Monster (and even Cambodia), Gray had winnowed out all the dark, troubled, frantic elements and saved them for this book: a lot of heavy drugging; a lot of wandering around the world in search of self, as far as Tibet; a jail term in Las Vegas; gay baths in Amsterdam; performing in a porno film in New York. (North/Gray was born in 1941, and some of these episodes are pure '60s.)

The book's interest—which it certainly has—depends on the novelty and variety of the episodes, as related by the narrator in the wide-eyed yet serene tone of an intelligent man discovering what it's possible to get into just through the accident of living. But inevitably it lacks what the monologues have throughout: the physical presence of Gray himself.

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