SOURCE: "Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and the Evolution of an Ironic Presence," in Theatre Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, March, 1989, pp. 75-94.

[In the following essay, Demastes examines the development and significance of Gray's innovative performance strategies for contemporary American drama. According to Demastes, "Gray has singularly succeeded in bringing to life on stage a political agenda similar to that demanded by experimentalists of an earlier epoch—the 1960s and 1970s—but in a manner that assures a 1980s reception."]

Spalding Gray's career in the theatre has encompassed a variety of theories and practices. He was educated in traditional forms, then moved to Richard Schechner's Performance Group, and later worked with the Wooster Group. Gray's current involvement in auto-performance shows a tremendous debt to these earlier affiliations, yet many critics seem to have dismissed Gray's current work as indulgent, dilettantish, and no longer part of the serious avant-garde experimentalist's concern. He has, after all, been co-opted into mainstream American culture, as his critics are quick to note. This easy dismissal of Gray, however, seems premature. In fact, many of the reasons Gray is dismissed are exactly the reasons Gray should be reconsidered.

This essay is an effort to place Gray's work more clearly into a performance genre context by first outlining the general critical assessment that avant-garde theatre in the 1980s is dying, then considering Gray's debt to Richard Schechner and the Performance Group, evaluating Gray's affiliation with Wooster Group members, and then demonstrating how this rich background is evident in Gray's current auto-performance pieces. In these works Gray creates a sophisticated theatrical persona, who himself reenacts an awakening onstage designed to sensitize the audience to its own awareness. The awakening comes over the persona onstage, and the enactment undermines comforting surfaces, forcing the audience to face realities—political and others—that it perhaps would prefer to ignore. In Swimming to Cambodia in particular, Gray has singularly succeeded in bringing to life on the stage a political agenda similar to that demanded by experimentalists of an earlier epoch—the 1960s and 1970s—but in a manner that assures a 1980s reception.

Critical Concern for the Loss of a Political Avant-Garde Agenda

Richard Schechner's 1982 work, The End of Humanism, echoes the pain many practitioners and theorists have felt about the recent work of avant-garde American theatre, a theatre whose early vitality promised much but unfortunately soon dissipated. Schechner notes that this vitality centered around a political agenda, one particularly focused on the Peace Movement of the 1960s and opposition to the Vietnam War. But, as Schechner argues,

Once the war ended and the recession of the mid-seventies hit, artists fell into a formalist deep freeze. Great work was done, but it was cut off: it did not manifest significant content. Instead a certain kind of "high art obscurity" took over.

Moving away from efforts to produce a politically conscious, culturally uniting forum, avant-garde theatre turned isolationist and narcissistic.

In The Eye of Prey, Herbert Blau similarly notes the turn toward isolationist undertakings. Reflecting on his own work in the theatre, Blau describes this transformation from the 1960s to current practices

as a deviation from Brecht through Beckett into a highly allusive, refractory, intensely self-reflexive, ideographically charged process in which we were trying to understand, to think through, at the very quick of thought—words, words, unspeakably in the body—the metabolism of perception in the (de)materialization of the text.

Though Blau's style is (intentionally) oblique, he seems to be arguing that earlier efforts to fathom broader issues of community have been replaced by the pursuit of understanding individual means of perception. Blau adds, "As with the Conceptual Art of the late sixties—particularly that strain of it which jeopardized the body in the self-reflexive activity of thought—the subject of our work, and the danger of its becoming, was solipsism."

But where Schechner saw vitality and "community" in the 1960s, Blau goes so far as to argue that the activist work of that decade itself was solipsistic in that its dream of paradise was naive and little more than an enfeebled attempt at political and idealistic awakening. The theatrical "recession" of the 1970s and 1980s merely brought greater attention to the fundamental flaws of the ideologies of the previous decade. Whatever their assessments of the 1960s, however, the two critics would agree on one matter. As Blau notes, "What seemed to be left in the recession, along with the new conservatism, was the dispossessed subject of the postmodern, reviewing the disenchantments, as if through the solipsistic orifice of a needle's eye." For both Schechner and Blau the unfortunate result of this "high art obscurity" with its attendant "dispossessed subject" was that avant-garde theatre lost its cultural base.

The results have become manifest in what Blau observed in Blooded Thought as a sort of "advocacy of confession in acting," of which "[t]here is also the offshoot of explicit autobiography, more or less disciplined, more or less confessed." Interestingly, at this point, Blau notes that the best of the genre are Gray's Rhode Island trilogy (formally entitled Three Places in Rhode Island) and Lee Breuer's Animations, but he adds, "Originally, the impulse had something devout about it, a kind of penance, as in the monastic period of Grotowski…." Though he acknowledged that self-exposure is essential to powerful theatre, Blau insists that "[i]t is not mere authenticity we're talking about …, the self-indulgent spillover of existential sincerity"; rather it must be "a critical act as well, exegetical, an urgency in the mode of performance …, part of its meaning, that the Text be understood, though the meaning be ever deferred." Blau complains that too much of such work has thus far failed to go beyond documenting "authenticity." Exegesis of such events, or of the presentations of the events, has yet to be pursued to Blau's satisfaction.

The disenchantment that Schechner and Blau feel, however, is not shared by C. W. E. Bigsby. Bigsby does agree that the American avant-garde "became an expression of intensely private experience, moving from the gnomic tableau of Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman to the heavily autobiographical pieces of the Wooster Group (the Rhode Island trilogy) and the monologues of Spalding Gray." Bigsby agrees that the work of the isolated subject often "concern[s] itself with the nature of perception and consciousness," which on the surface may do little to establish community and more to increase isolation. But though the works may turn inwardly rather than reach outwardly, Bigsby points out that

it may well be that in requiring audiences to offer their own completions, in provoking a degree of aesthetic complicity and imaginative collaboration, such theatre practitioners may be reminding them [audiences] of their capacity to act and to imagine a world beyond the banality of appearance.

Such art subtly requires an audience involvement, an "imaginative collaboration," that may ultimately establish a bond more true than any tangible "hand-holding" could strive for. Overt physical involvement has been replaced by a more subtle imaginative involvement, and the substitution, says Bigsby, may in fact be for the better. That such a possibility for bonding even exists under these circumstances is something Schechner clearly ignores and Blau seems skeptical that he has ever witnessed—at least he has not seen it in the efforts of performers like Gray and Breuer. For Bigsby, however, not only does the possibility exist, but in rare moments, so does the reality.

Gray's Wooster Agenda: The Rhode Island Trilogy

What Schechner particularly confronts in his End of Humanism assault on the "lost" theatre is the work of the auto-performers, which has dominated theatre recently. Schechner argues that the work is "brilliant, but not enough; personalistic rather than concerned with the polis, the life of the City, the life of the people." He concludes: "With this personalism comes a passivity, an acceptance of the City, the outer world, the world of social relations, economics, and politics, as it is." In his book, Schechner focuses on the evolution of his own splintered Performance Group, now called the Wooster Group, and the further splintering of that group by the individual efforts of Spalding Gray. Ironically, it was Schechner's own liberating teachings that caused the split and led Gray eventually to work on his own.

Gray explains the process of overturning his dependency on written texts and directorial leadership, a dependency he had grown accustomed to in his earlier, more traditional training:

Richard Schechner reversed this process for me. He emphasized the performer, making him more than, or as important as, the text … [H]e was a liberator from assembly line acting techniques. The way that I interpreted Schechner's theories was that I was free to do what I wanted, be who I was, and trust that the text would give this freedom a structure.

Gray agrees with Blau's assessment, noted earlier, that his early effort after he separated from Schechner, the Rhode Island trilogy, was narcissistically confessional, noting, "I am by nature extremely narcissistic and reflective. For as long as I can remember, I have always been self-conscious and aware of my everyday actions." Gray adds, "I began my own work out of a desire to be both active and reflective at the same time before an audience." This process, however, extended beyond self-conscious presentation of his private life, becoming, in addition, a therapeutic endeavor. For example, Gray describes one of the trilogy pieces, Sakonnet Point, as a

series of simple actions … that created a series of images like personal, living Rorschachs. These images were not unlike the blank, white wall in Zen meditations, nor were they unlike the mirror reflection of a good therapist.

Given this personal bent and its therapeutic design, such work could very easily be construed as isolationist. As Bigsby notes, "[F]or Richard Schechner this work [Gray's] and that of others implied a regrettable shift not merely from a public to a private art but from a concern with subject to a concern with subjectivity." In fact, Bigsby notes the obvious conclusion to such thoughts when he observes of Schechner, "As the title of his book, The End of Humanism, seems to imply, he [Schechner] saw this as in some sense a betrayal." Gray, however, disagrees that any betrayal occurred, arguing in his own defense: "Often, what the audience saw was the reflection of their own minds, their own projections." In other words, the private art reached the public, though in subtler ways than Schechner might have advocated. Instead of direct surface confrontation, undercurrents began to play a central role.

One of the central reasons Schechner fails to see—or acknowledge—this approach as promoting audience involvement is that Gray and the Wooster Group abandoned Schechner's more overt practice of environmental participation between audience and performer and returned to a clear distinction between performance space and audience space. Bigsby reports the shift that Schechner bemoans:

Where in the 1960s and early 1970s Off and Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theatre has seen itself as essentially a public art inviting the full physical participation of the audience, either as a gesture of solidarity with its political objectives or as evidence of a refusal of all restraints (including the special framing of the theatrical event),… the audience found itself excluded from the stage onto which it had once been invited and increasingly denied access to meaning.

The overall result, claims Schechner, is that "[w]ithout meaning to be, such productions became elitist: not necessarily for the economic elite … but for the artistically 'in.'" For Schechner, both the subject and the presentational methods have reduced the audience to coterie size instead of expanding it to build a larger sense of community.

That Gray's work is intensely personal is, of course, a given. But that it is more than just personal therapy is often overlooked, as is the fact that it does strive to embrace more than a coterie following. First of all, the techniques Gray used in the Rhode Island trilogy incorporate elements learned from Schechner, and they helped Gray overcome some of his intensely personal focus. Says Gray:

Through being part of this [earlier] process, I developed an integrated understanding of how a group could collaborate in the creation of a mise-en-scène. This led directly to being able to work with some Group members and some people outside The Group on my own work. The source of the work was myself, but the final product was a result of the collective conceptual actions of all involved. Thus, in the end, it is a group autobiography.

The "work was myself" idea escaped extreme solipsism since the work was reflected off of other "selves," such as Elizabeth LeCompte. Gray's confidante and directorial advisor. In that regard, at least, there was a nominal sense of community.

But the product was more than merely a blend and modification of selves isolated in a small group, as some would see it. It clearly entered the more universal realm of art in that it confronted aesthetic issues as traditional art did, though in a much more "open-nerved" manner. Says Gray:

[I]t became not the art of pretending I was someone else but an art that began to approach the idea that I was someone else. I wanted to give up the names, to close the gaps. It was no longer to be the "Stanley Kowalski self" or the "Hamlet self," but now it was a play of moods, energies, aspects of self. It became the many-in-the-one that had its source in the archetype of the performer, not in the text.

The connection between performance in life and in art became a central concern, but it extended beyond Gray's own isolated self. Again, this aspect of Gray's style is one he learned from Schechner. It allowed him to discover "self," but in this presentation and discovery of self, he discovered "other" as well.

By chance, I might suddenly find myself performing an action that was an aspect of me, and, upon reflection see it as an action belonging to Orpheus. Then, for that moment, I would be both Spalding and Orpheus. I was never one or the other and could be someone or something completely different for each audience member because they also live with their "names" and associations. It is their story as well as mine.

If the trilogy succeeds as intended, the piece should build foundations for community in the manner Bigsby describes, with results Schechner and Blau probably would finally approve. In requiring audiences to exact their own completions, as Bigsby describes it, Gray enables the audience to make contact with "self" and to communicate with "other" as well.

There is yet another aspect of Gray's trilogy work that could lead to charges of solipsism. Gray notes that "[a]ll of Sakonnet Point was built from free associations within the performing space. There were no 'ideas' about how it should be, nor was there any attempt to tell a meaningful story." James Bierman notes that the piece "is more evocative in style than expositional," and Arnold Aronson concludes that the play's "value lay not in any informational structure but in their capacity for evoking further images and moods. The creators did not intend to provoke thought but rather an inward contemplation." The result could very well be solipsistic.

The actors, of course, develop this inward contemplation, but communication transferral oćcurs when the audience feels the urge toward a similar development. According to Gray, "Often, what the audience saw was the reflection of their own minds, their own projections." But the process clearly requires an active desire on the part of the audience. Gray is aware of the need for active desire, having "desired" it himself while he viewed the works of other artists who strove to achieve the same subtle end. In fact, Gray identifies with a growing avant-garde tradition concerned with such involvement:

I think Sakonnet Point was like the work of Robert Wilson and Meredith Monk. I had found that while watching their work my mind was left free to associate and my eye was grounded in watching the execution of their chosen actions. It was this grounding of my eye that gave my mind a quality of freedom I'd not experienced in theatre before. For me, the work of Wilson and Monk was dealing with the use of, and investigation into the nature of, mind projections. This seemed to be getting to the roots of what theatre and life are about. It is a kind of therapeutic lesson about how we create our own world through our projections.

Gray concludes his observations with a performer's perspective by noting that Sakonnet Point "was very involving and seemed therapeutic for the audience as well as the performer." In this regard, Schechner's advocacy of physical involvement of the audience has been replaced by a perceptual, conceptual, emotional, and mental involvement of the audience.

Another part of the trilogy, Rumstick Road, focused on Gray's mother's suicide, but as Gray notes, "Although the basis of the piece was the voices and pictures of my family, the other performers were free to take off from this material and develop their own scores." He admits that the piece was "confessional," but asserts "[i]t was also an act of distancing." Through distancing, Gray became, to use Blau's term, exegetical. Gray observes,

Finally, if it is therapeutic, it is not so much so in the fact that it is confessional but in the fact that it is ART. The historic event of my mother's suicide is only a part of the fabric of that ART. Finally, the piece is not about suicide; it is about making ART.

Perhaps the clearest expression of analysis and exegesis in the trilogy's final piece, Nyatt School, which concentrates on the effects of being introduced to Freudian psychology. Gray argues that despite its distorted perspective on the world in general and language in particular, Freudian psychology is quite "real" nonetheless. Says Gray, "I felt and believed this at the time and wanted to make a theatre piece that was not only a reflection of that strange world, but the world itself."

Considering the trilogy as a unit, Gray states that he has moved beyond therapy and mere presentation of personal events to a realm of philosophical analysis of a more universal condition. His trilogy, he says,

reflect[s] upon themes of loss. They are not just about the loss of my mother but about the feeling of loss itself. I have had this feeling for as long as I can remember. It is the feeling that the "I" that I call "me" is only a visitor here. No, not even a visitor because a visitor goes elsewhere after he visits. I have no word for it, and the work is the attempt at giving expression to that absent word.

If Gray begins with personal experience, he moves with that experience to a plane that reflects more than just his own condition. Gray admits, "I fantasize that if I am true to art it will be the graceful vehicle which will return me to life." But in this process something more than personal therapy occurs, for "[t]he very act of communication takes it into a 'larger vein' and brings it back to community."

Gray's transition from Group assisted work to performing monologues recounting his life stemmed from a double realization, one part taken from the Group, that "[s]omewhere along the line, every action became for me a piece of theatre" and the other a new one that saw "employing the old oral tradition [as] a fresh breath in these high tech times … with all its human energy and vividness." Gray's work has simply developed from an age-old observation that life is performance coupled with a new realization that life's tools, therefore, are performer's tools as well and are complete in themselves.

Gray notes, in a pattern similar to Richard Schechner's, that "Theatre is about presence = Life = Death" and asserts that reviving an oral tradition is his new "hope for passing it all down." With this new realization about performance/presence came a new outlook on theatre: "The personal confessional, stripped of its grand theatrical metaphors, is what matters to me now." Past avant-garde efforts to create a new theatrical "language"—his own efforts or others'—have consumed energy that otherwise could have been utilized for more substantial ends. Perhaps using current tools will be sufficient, and perhaps even returning to simple monologue will be the most effective means of all. In one regard, at least, the return is fortunate. Being unable to establish a way to pass down the lessons and experiences of avant-garde theatre was one of Schechner's incidental concerns in The End of Humanism. Gray notes that an answer as simple as "oral tradition" was "one that Richard didn't mention." Since Gray's discovery of the potential of the oral tradition, it has been the avenue he has pursued.

The Wooster's L.S.D. Agenda

Returning to this traditional means of communication in avant-garde art, however, can hinder efforts to challenge the status quo. In particular, problems arise when an art form empowers a lone presence and when it empowers a tool—language—that has acquired a social or political tyranny over any liberating potential in that art. In this regard, Philip Auslander joins Blau and Schechner, expressing general concern that recent avant-garde theatre has turned apolitical or, even worse, reactionary. The concept of presence, and therefore of authority, according to Auslander, "is the specific problematic theatre theorists and practitioners must confront in reexamining our assumptions about political theatre and its function." He argues that "the theatre is precisely a locus at which critical/aesthetic and social practices intersect." The aesthetic of presence is necessarily entwined with the social, and therefore political, reality of presence, according to Auslander.

In addressing these issues, Auslander examines the work of the Wooster Group (without Gray) and in particular the piece L.S.D. (… Just the High Points …), arguing that the Group's efforts epitomize the as yet incomplete political efforts of the recent avant-garde to challenge authority as a socially/culturally entrenched power tool. The strategy the Group utilizes involves irony, in a manner that another critic, Elinor Fuchs, has described: "In the past, the Wooster Group's undercutting of one text by another, of one reading by another, and of both by the incisive use of segments of film, resulted in an almost wholly ironic dramaturgy." In the case of L.S.D., the text of Miller's The Crucible is undermined. Although Fuchs concludes of this recent work that Wooster's "irony now seems unclear," Auslander asserts that the Group's efforts are moving in the right direction. He notes with approval the fact that Wooster entangled itself in the well-documented debate over its own right to manipulate Miller's text versus Miller's right to control performance of his work: "LeCompte [the Group's director] correctly describes the conflict with Miller as 'an inevitable outcome of our working process' and as a part of the Group's 'necessary relationship to authority.'"

But Auslander adds that LeCompte has failed to realize fully that "confrontation with authority is a result but not the object of the Group's process," noting that "[t]he Group seems blithely, perhaps utopianly, to proceed as if the poststructuralist critical/theoretical concept of text as 'a tissue of quotations' belonging more to a culture than an individual were already in place as part of the social hegemony." The Group confronts the text as a product of a social/cultural power structure rather than the product of an individual "author," but before Wooster can attack the text as a social/cultural manifestation, it must first rigorously confront the authority of the individual—Miller—in its art rather than incidentally through outside litigation. So, rather irregularly,

The effect of the Group's action is not so much to question Miller's rights over his text as to show what would be possible in the realm of cultural production if those rights were not in force, thus emphasizing the importance of the connection between the cultural and the social/political.

According to Auslander, this assumption that as a text The Crucible asserts a social/cultural authority is accurate, but it needs further development, given the Group's naively utopian perspective on the issue.

As the Group undermines "authority" as a social/cultural manifestation, so must it strive to undermine "presence" itself—in this case presence of the author—since suspicion has been cast upon presence. According to Auslander, the suspicion "derives from the apparent collusion between political structures of authority and the pervasive power of presence." The Wooster Group needs to continue its "transgressive" behavior in order to overcome the

obvious inappropriateness of the political art strategies left over from the historical avant-garde of the early 20th century and from the 1960s, and by a widespread critical inability to conceive of aesthetic/political praxis in terms other than these inherited ones.

Continuing to refine means of undermining both authority and presence should remain part of the essential political avant-garde agenda.

A major problem arises, however, in the effort to realize that objective, and that has to do with the tool that conveys authority and confirms presence—language. Ideally, a new "language" needs to be constructed in order to free society from an old language rife with empowering prejudices. In response to Auslander's article, Schechner makes the following important concession: "Once I considered the Wooster Group nihilistic, and apolitical, but I was wrong." Though Schechner does not specify why he has changed his opinion, it can be assumed that he accepts Auslander's perspective on the Wooster Group, that the politics of L.S.D. pulls Wooster out of the depths of nihilism and empty aesthetics.

However, Schechner calls attention to a central problem inherent in Auslander's progressive goal of undermining presence and authority in the theatre. Moving away from theatre in particular and seeing what he calls "several kinds of 'progressive' thinking going on simultaneously" in the world at large, Schechner identifies "the problem's nub: translation is impossible; meaning is not separate from or prior to expression."

By translation, Schechner means transferring meaning from one cultural (or professional) idiom to another. He concludes that "[t]he problem today is that ways of speaking are mutually untranslatable." Idioms themselves have become isolated in their very efforts to undermine the old and create new systems. In this regard Schechner notes that even a possible dialogue between a "progressive" artist (LeCompte), theorist (Auslander), and politician (he uses Jesse Jackson) would be difficult, if not impossible, because their languages are so self-confined and so untranslatable into the others' idioms. The solipsistic dilemma arises again, this time out of a progressive agenda that strives to challenge power itself, which entails challenging the language that enforces that power. For even those who have actually tried to challenge the power (LeCompte, Auslander, Jackson) have difficulty uniting under one flag, given the particular sources of power (and language) they are working to challenge. So, if in undermining current language and current cultural power in general these groups cannot unite and make significant contact during the struggle, what is the hope for more general cultural unity if such a progressive "revolution" succeeds?

Simply put, since language is a source of cultural/social power, any direct efforts at substantively changing the culture's/society's power structure entails reevaluating and "re-creating" language itself. The efforts that Auslander and other similar thinkers espouse seem fated to lead to an impossible cultural/social order, since without communication there can be no community and since the lines of communication have already been severed in the very attempt to communicate this challenge of power. And in regard to art, such efforts can lead only to an impossible theatre. Finally, efforts such as those espoused by Auslander at creating a new cohesion lead to greater solipsism. Schechner seems quite rightly to concede that his earlier "environmental" efforts could be replaced by more subtle means of presentation, but he also quite accurately observes that the idealistic goals of this new generation of theorists/practitioners may ultimately be unattainable. Spalding Gray, however, provides an alternative.

Gray's Auto-Performance Agenda

Gray left Schechner's Performance Group at about the same time Schechner himself left, and the Performance Group reformed as the Wooster Group. Gray then separately collaborated with Elizabeth LeCompte, the current director of Wooster. The Rhode Island trilogy bears many marks of both groups' ensemble styles and can be considered one of many predecessors of the Wooster Group's later works, which culminated in L.S.D. (… Just the High Points …) But on a superficial level, at least, Gray's unscripted monologues bear little if any resemblance to the Group's work, since he relies almost completely on a single "presence" seated at a table verbally communicating to an audience, instead of opting for a more nondiscursive style that relied less heavily on an empowered language. As Don Shewey notes, "Unlike his colleagues in the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, whose experimentation took them further into high-tech performance, Gray reclaimed the ancient art of storytelling, simply sitting at a desk and addressing an attentive audience in the intimacy of the Performance Garage." In fact, Vincent Canby notes that Gray's reliance on language has eliminated virtually any other form of communication, noting that "it would be a coup de theatre if he [Gray] just stood up." Ostensibly, Gray has given up on any idea of creating an alternative form of language for the theatre—technology assisted or otherwise—turning as he does to oral tradition as his means of communication.

This difference between Gray and his former colleagues, however, is more apparent than real. Though Gray is literally "telling" his story, there are indications that he is carrying on the Wooster tradition, utilizing a different approach to achieve virtually the same end. Reviews regularly have made note of Gray's WASP background, and Gray himself openly acknowledges in his monologues his comfortable middle-class, New England heritage. Given his privileged upbringing, it would seem that Gray had two options in pursuing an avant-garde, political agenda. He could reject his personal history and join the ranks of those out of power in an effort to enact change from without, and thus come to the theatre as less than a historically genuine spokesperson—a "have" joining in with the "have-nots." Or he could accept his personal history of privilege and work from within, accepting, at least for rhetorical purposes, his position of authority—"to the manor born"—complete with the empowering tools of that system, language certainly included. This second option, at first glance hardly a position for an avant-garde performer, is the option Gray has chosen. Choosing that option, it seems, was the cause for his split with his former colleagues.

If nothing else, Gray's separation from the Wooster Group and acceptance of his position of privilege circumvents one criticism Auslander advances concerning members of the Group who have been lured, however temporarily, away from the political/aesthetic theatre of the Group and into various commercial media. Such shifting, according to Auslander, "was not considered a worthy objective by the sixties generation," and now that it has occurred, "it could be seen as implying an alarming lack of integrity on the part of young experimental artists." Lack of integrity is, of course, a serious charge. Given Gray's decision to remain in the realm of the empowered, however, he can move from one format to another, and this mobility is the basis of his dramatic method.

In this method, several Spalding Grays are at work. First, the "observer-of-events," Spalding Gray the private citizen, works in a nearly reportorial fashion to uncover the system's shortcomings as he lives the life of a privileged middle-class male. The results of this espionage, in turn, are handed over to Gray the artist to create a work offering a critical perspective on the system. The piece is presented by Gray the naive performer, who appears fully incorporated into the system and is unaware of the ironies introduced into his presentation by the artist Gray, who shaped the material reported by the observer Gray. Who is the actual Spalding Gray? As far as his Wooster-rooted agenda is concerned, such a question is irrelevant. Gray's onstage work finally presents material, seemingly without comment, in an ironic manner that confronts the same power structure exposed by Wooster's L.S.D. Thus while Gray's work may appear supportive of the status quo, it presents a persona who ironically utilizes an empowered naivety to undermine itself and the authority it seems to uphold.

Gray's ironic approach apparently owes something to his association with Wooster. In fact, as Wooster's irony attempts to do, Gray's ironic posturing confronts both authority and presence, as Auslander hoped the avant-garde in general would do. But given the potential power of "presence" in performance in general and in Gray's work in particular, it would seem that auto-performance—especially monologues—would strengthen the hold of presence rather than weaken it. However, Fuchs has observed a kind of "revenge of writing," as she calls it, in many recent works of the avant-garde, a revenge whose aim, it seems, "is the undermining of theatrical Presence." Though she does not discuss Gray, Gray's performance "text" seeks just that end—the undermining of the performer's presence. Then what of Gray the behind-the-scenes author? The authority of Gray the author would be expected to assert itself. One must look back at the actual performance to understand how the text in turn undermines Gray the author's authority. One must realize that the performer has "misread" the text as he presents it, thereby undermining any of its discursive "meaning" in favor of a meaning that works to undermine textuality itself. For the audience, there may be—and usually is—a "pleasure in the text," but there is little real didactic substance that ultimately demands attention, and so there is even less attention paid to the authority of the text. Reaching beyond both written authority and physical presence is the design of Gray's works. Each consumes the other, leaving a void that forces the audience to doubt the power of either and search within itself for a replacement, empowering the audience, then, in the process.

In one regard, Gray's work can be seen, superficially, as an unconventional affirmation of the "conventional" itself. But going beneath surfaces, it becomes evident that the work is an attack on empowering convention in general, effected by high-lighting the ultimate empowering convention—language. The possibility for confusion is fortunate, for it has allowed Gray to enter the mainstream of popular culture, since his "hidden" agenda has been misread by the mass of socially/politically empowered literalists who have been unable to penetrate beneath Gray's surfaces. As a result Gray has been able to influence the order's very consciousness.

In Rivkala's Ring, his adaptation of a Chekhov story for the collection of short dramatic works entitled Orchards, Gray offers advice to others on how to perform the piece, advice that sums up his view of his own persona on stage:

I see the character [in Rivkala's Ring] as a manic-y paranoid person who's spinning off these kind of paranoid delusions, trying to make order out of a very frightening and chaotic existence. So I see it fashioned after my character, the character of Spalding Gray that I do in the monologues.

The passage both acknowledges Gray's awareness of at least two Spalding Grays and outlines the personality of the stage persona Gray. Frank Rich sees the same split and notes,

What makes Spalding Gray so theatrical in his seemingly nontheatrical way is not only his talent as a storyteller and social observer but also his ability to deepen the mystery of the demarcation line between performer and role.

Thus, although it may at times be difficult to distinguish Gray the private citizen from Gray the performer, Gray himself insists on drawing the distinction.

The "manic-y paranoia" is a deliberately manufactured characteristic. It renders the persona harmless and disarming, enabling him to draw the audience into the monologue, overcoming the defenses with which it would resist a political manifesto on the stage. As Novick notes, "Although he [Gray] was artistically nurtured by that company of screaming meemies, the Wooster Group, his art as a monologuist is the art of understatement." Gussow adds, speaking of the difference between the Rhode Island trilogy in general and a monologue like Gray's 47 Beds in particular, that "[w]hile the performance pieces often sacrifice intelligibility in the interest of visual and aural stimulation, the solo work is as entertaining as it is eccentric."

The strategy is subtle yet effective in evoking the audience involvement Gray desired in his more frenetic Rhode Island trilogy but attained in a different manner. The audience is drawn in with entertaining twists, and the pleasure and attendant complacency are undermined through the same entertainingly palatable means. The man/presence who has charmed the audience onstage often is also drawn into the process of realization that the audience eventually experiences. It must be emphasized, however, that the language itself undermines, not any empowered presence. As Maslin notes, Gray the performer is "never inclined to talk with ironic detachment, no matter how absurd or strange or painful the circumstances he describes." Gray the performer is immersed; it is the behind-the-scenes artist Gray who is ironically detached and subtly confrontational. But that is not clearly seen in the performing area. Rather, since the persona onstage is guileless, it is left to the audience to deduce the ironies. Signals from either an empowered physical presence or from an unseen authority are virtually nonexistent.

The above analysis applies best to Swimming to Cambodia, but to a lesser degree it applies to most of Gray's monologues. David Guy notes that the collection of early auto-performance pieces (polished transcriptions of his stage work) entitled Sex and Death to the Age 14 reveals a "belief on Mr. Gray's part … that there is more substance in the simple telling of stories than in more self-conscious art forms." Guy adds, "There is also a belief that the real truth in life lies in its most banal and embarrassing moments, that to pretty things up is to falsify them." The pieces go beyond mere documentation. Such works as Interviewing the Audience, for example, reveal an underlying motive even in Gray's most purely and simply confessional pieces of the period. Namely, they work, as Shewey notes, at "drawing others into his philosophical obsessions (is there a heaven? does true love exist?) and imparting to unbelievers the rewards of the examined life." As with Gray's trilogy agenda, "self-examination" is the essential point Gray tries to put across in these performance pieces. But here he has shifted approaches, presenting an insubstantial substance that works as bait to draw in his audience. Says Gray,

There are two audiences for my work … There are people who live in the kind of life I have. They're very unrooted, they do a lot of different things, and they experience the world as fragmented. The other extreme is the householder who is my age now … who's right in the midst of raising two or three children, who's keeping down a job, and who's able to enjoy the stories vicariously, the same way he would Kerouac's On the Road.

Gray's work appeals to middle America, but for those who can see more than vicarious experience in the works, the pieces take on an ironic significance, revealing fragmentation and unrootedness that is a first step to a political awakening.

Having truly made the leap into mainstream American culture with his Swimming to Cambodia—first for the stage and recently as a screenplay—Gray has contributed to the postmodern blurring of high art and popular culture that Auslander discusses. But that is only an incidental result of his work. What is central is that the piece clearly moves toward a political agenda in a manner more obvious, it seems, than his earlier work. In this piece Gray clearly observes that he has moved beyond simple narcissism, if even he were merely narcissistic. With Swimming to Cambodia, Gray reports he found an objective situation that freed him from any narcissistic spell: "People writing reviews have called me a narcissist, and I would certainly admit to that…. But with Swimming to Cambodia I found a larger issue outside of my personal neuroses." Concerning this move to a "larger issue," Fuchs remarks, "Swimming to Cambodia, especially Part I, represents an artistic culmination for Gray as well as an impressive political breakthrough." Gray's method of presentation has finally found matter that allows him to exhibit his form's ironic agenda fully.

The work, in fact, succeeds in a way that led Fuchs to make the following comment; "Throughout, Gray's story proceeds by daring 'leaps and circles' … as if his perceptions of reality now imitated his earlier Cage-ean experiments." For Fuchs, Gray's presentation of multiple levels in the work clearly demonstrates the fruits of his "Cage-ean" Rhode Island, Wooster, and Performance Group exercises. It acknowledges processes that go beyond chronological construction and reflect psychological emphases expressed in apparently chaotic ramblings. In truth, however, the apparent rambling reflects a unity: A surface—and narcissistic—goal of finding a "perfect moment" is pursued—while a deeper underlying "moment of understanding" is exposed, and the critical instincts of the audience are required to discern the revelation beneath the naive presentation of Gray the stage persona. It is what Fuchs calls a "projection of Gray's WASP persona … onto the world scene" in an ironic manner that not only contributes to the piece's humor but also allows it to present historic and political verities without smelling of didacticism.

Looking for a "perfect moment" is one of the central pursuits in Swimming to Cambodia. In the tale Gray recounts, he refuses to leave Thailand because, as he says, "I hadn't had a Perfect Moment yet, and I always like to have one before I leave an exotic place." Amidst all the revelations of suffering and death Gray experiences while in Thailand, looking for a perfect moment remains his central obsession. This self-indulgent (or perhaps "therapeutic") end prevents the performer from becoming a reliable political spokesman; in fact, it positions Gray in the role of mindless American oppressor, a part of the problem rather than part of a cure. Gray can even happily report in performance, "I'm not very political," which obviously undermines his authority. But one sees even more than Gray's undermining of himself when he turns into an American "Everyman" in the story by Roland Joffe, director of The Killing Fields, who hires Gray for the movie because of this comment: "Perfect! We're looking for the American ambassador's aide."

The event that triggered Swimming to Cambodia was the filming of The Killing Fields, in which Gray had a small part. The film, shot in Thailand, documents the holocaust in Cambodia under Pol Pot. Gray's participation in the film provided the opportunity for Gray the artist/reporter to present Gray the performer in circumstances that allow that persona unwittingly to present material transcending both his personal narcissism and the narcissism of the filming group, all egocentric artists and craftsmen whose work is undermined by Gray's artistic response. Even though he is a minor figure in the movie, Gray is pampered and coddled during production, given the impression that he is important, while he lacks any sense of awareness whatsoever.

But some of Gray the reporter/author infuses itself. For example, Gray the performer reports about when he learned of American involvement in Cambodia, first observing, "leave it to a Brit [Roland Joffe] to tell you your own history," and then tellingly adding, "as Roland reminded me, we're not living in a democracy." Messages from Gray the author slip through, but ever so subtly, and never supported by the authority of Gray the performer. The comment seems offered as little more than a curious bit of information for the audience to react to. As another example, when discussing the possibility of nuclear holocaust, Gray drops a line reminiscent of something Schechner himself would say: "Mother Earth needs a long, long rest." But the point is not developed any further; it is merely tossed out for the audience to consider.

Gray even directly addresses the issue of language and power that so concerns Auslander, through an anecdote set in New York in which he cannot communicate with his disorderly neighbors, observing: "I don't know the language. I knew the language when I was with my people in Boston in 1962, in whitebread homogeneous Boston, brick-wall Boston." He lifts this personal dilemma to a larger question when he concludes:

I wonder how do we begin to approach the so-called Cold War (or Now-Heating-Up War) between Russia and America if I can't even begin to resolve the Hot War down on Northmoor and Greenwich in Lower Manhattan?

To a point Gray the performer seems to grow up, becoming more aware of the world around him. But the moments when he "pronounces" judgment on the world are relatively rare, and even those are regularly undermined by his continual return to the narcissistic search for the "perfect moment." So too is any possible authority undermined, since the moments of awakening are little more than subplot behind the obsession about the "perfect moment." And Gray the performer loves that search for the "perfect moment," hungers for it.

Fuchs notes that "the actual story of the making of the film becomes a hallucinogenic recapitulation not only of the tragedy in Cambodia but of the universal torment by those who wield power over those who don't." Maslin notes, "What elevates this [monologue] above the realm of small talk is Mr. Gray's round-about—and peculiarly suspenseful—way of dramatizing the episode's [filming's] moral and political repercussions." These go beyond demonstrating the political power of some abstract government force over the oppressed in general to include the "innocent" abuses of the power-wielding camera crews, directors, and actors who manipulate the local inhabitants of the various film sites.

This control is illustrated by an innocent observation by Gray the performer. Recalling an ascent in a helicopter, he states, "I saw, my God, how much area the film covered!" In fact, the film controlled more than the physical territory Gray observed from above; there was economic and from that psychological and ethical control as well. As Gussow notes, among other things, Swimming to Cambodia "is a close-up, on-location analysis of the monumental absurdities of moviemaking." In making this point, Gray the artist has moved from a narcissistic and subjective perspective. He reveals the outside, well-intentioned efforts to portray the monumental destruction of war and revolution upon a culture as an invasion of that same oppressed culture. The effort to document the cruelties of oppression also is oppression.

Though the Gray persona's narcissistic shell hides overt commentary, Gray the artist clearly has abandoned narcissism. The piece makes the point that oppression is endemic to American culture, whether or not it is intentional. It is multi-layered, even in the performance, for Swimming to Cambodia challenges the oppression of The Killing Fields even as The Killing Fields documents the oppression of Pol Pot. Dika comments on this effect in Swimming to Cambodia: "What in The Killing Fields had seemed a complete, integrated rendition of reality is now disrupted. Gray's words serve to break the seamless flow of images, cracking them open like eggshells." The authority of The Killing Fields itself is undermined, very much the same way Wooster's L.S.D. worked to undermine The Crucible. The result is what Lisa Zeidner calls "a hall of mirrors because nothing is quite real." Determining the route through this hall of mirrors, ultimately, is left up to the audience.

Finally, at the end of the shorter version recorded as the movie, Gray makes a cryptic observation about the dangerous indulgences he has been part of when he pronounces, without further explanation: "And just as I was dozing off in the Pleasure Prison [what he calls the cast's hotel], I had a flash. An inkling. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that killed Marilyn Monroe." Gray the performer momentarily cracks here to reveal Gray the reporter (or maybe Gray the reintegrated self). The insider's view that Gray the artist has experienced has revealed exactly how destructive/oppressive the indulgences of the power elite can be, even/especially within their ranks.

An even more compelling tale concludes the transcription of the longer stage version. It is of a dream Gray has in which he witnesses a straw boy consumed by flame. The dream takes place in Hollywood, where Gray wanders the streets trying to tell the event to anyone who will listen, including several members of the Wooster Group. Gray concludes both the dream anecdote and the entire piece, with:

And I knew all the time I was telling this story that it was a cover for the real story, the Straw Boy Story, which, for some reason, I found impossible to tell.

The text, finally, avoids the central issue, never even announces the issue, and thus the validity of the performer's presence is undermined, as is the entire text itself. Finally, Swimming to Cambodia strives to ground itself in some "other" that it cannot present because it cannot be presented. To fill the void, Gray has presented exactly what is not to be valued, which impacts on the audience all the more, since it has been valued, to some degree, throughout the performance. It is now all shown to be the very thing that destroys. In some ways what really needs to be told is too horrible to tell except by indirection, even if there were a language to tell it.

Gray has undermined a great many of the cultural icons that Wooster and many other more confrontational groups strive to undermine, but Gray clearly avoids doing so with any alienating revolutionary contempt; rather he employs a disarming process that works its way into establishment sensibilities with an alarming allure that charms as it undermines. But Gray goes even farther, having his own stage presence mesmerized as it mesmerizes the audience. The effect is that audiences are left not with a sense of betrayal, but with a sense that they have developed even as the onstage presence has developed; something of a community has been achieved.

The fact that Gray's work is art prevents it from exhibiting no authorial or presence power whatsoever. However, Swimming to Cambodia succeeds in minimizing that power in performance while, more importantly, it points out exactly how dangerously engulfing that power is. It critiques The Killing Fields and simultaneously undermines the perceived power of its own presence, whose spell has temporarily controlled the audience. Gray observes that we've all been consumed; in fact, he demonstrates it by "leading" with his own presence. Though Auslander's wish to see a movement toward no "power" at all seems fated never to occur, minimizing "power," undermining it, and demonstrating its danger seem to be the next best set of options, real options substituting for unreachable idealities.

The directly confrontational political agenda that many have looked for—and perhaps found elsewhere—does not exist in Gray. It is an agenda that owes a debt to the efforts of the 1960s and early 1970s but has indeed moved beyond those efforts. It is indebted to Schechner and the Performance Group, to Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group, and, though execution and performance does redirect itself, Gray's agenda follows directly, if sometimes obliquely, from the efforts of his predecessors.