There were 18 monologues in all. Fortunately, several were made into movies: Swimming to Cambodia, directed by Jonathan Demme, Monster in a Box, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and Gray's Anatomy, the story of his quest to avoid terrifying eye surgery with visits to faith healers, a Native American sweat lodge, a psychic surgeon in the Phillippines and finally conventional medicine and the realization of "a perfect ying-and-yang existence." Gray said said that "Humpty Dumpty" would be a perfect title for all his stories, because they were about "falling apart and coming together again."
Gray's twenty-year career included books, acting roles on Broadway and in many films including The Killing Fields (the Swimming to Cambodia monologue grew out of his experiences shooting this film in Thailand,) and Beaches. (After a love scene with him, Bette Midler said "Now don't go telling the Wooster Group that I kiss like Hitler," referring to the Soho theater ensemble Gray co-founded early in his career.)
Gray's twenty-year career included books, acting roles on Broadway and in many films including The Killing Fields (the Swimming to Cambodia monologue grew out of his experiences shooting this film in Thailand,) and Beaches. (After a love scene with him, Bette Midler said "Now don't go telling the Wooster Group that I kiss like Hitler," referring to the Soho theater ensemble Gray co-founded early in his career.)
Despite other monologists known for mining personal territory - Lenny Bruce, Eric Bogosian, Mike Feder - Gray so owned the genre that playwright August Wilson considered doing a one-man show called I'm Not Spalding Gray. He was different from solo humorists like Garrisson Keillor and Jerry Seinfeld, because he relentlessly shared his most personal secrets.
Ever since Sigmund Freud came on the scene and James Joyce elevated the emotional life of Leopold Bloom to the level of the heroic epic Ulysses, edgier modern storytellers have made psychological experiences their main themes. Even in the war novels of those consummate macho men Hemingway and Mailer the focus often is not the grand vista of the battlefield, but the reactions of individuals. Gray's work is modernist in this sense, except that he did not hide behind a fictional character. Described in the press as "the gentile Woody Allen" and "the ultimate WASP neurotic," he was so confessional that reviewers sometimes found the details he confided to the audience tasteless or cringe-making. The New York Times observed that his monologue Morning, Noon and Night "discourses meaningfully on such patented Gray matters as death and chance and passing gas in public."
Ever since Sigmund Freud came on the scene and James Joyce elevated the emotional life of Leopold Bloom to the level of the heroic epic Ulysses, edgier modern storytellers have made psychological experiences their main themes. Even in the war novels of those consummate macho men Hemingway and Mailer the focus often is not the grand vista of the battlefield, but the reactions of individuals. Gray's work is modernist in this sense, except that he did not hide behind a fictional character. Described in the press as "the gentile Woody Allen" and "the ultimate WASP neurotic," he was so confessional that reviewers sometimes found the details he confided to the audience tasteless or cringe-making. The New York Times observed that his monologue Morning, Noon and Night "discourses meaningfully on such patented Gray matters as death and chance and passing gas in public."
As his art matured, it acquired more colors and darkness, and he transcended the personal, gliding effortlessly into questions that concern everybody. Like a modern-day Hamlet, he asked the big question: how we can live joyfully in a world that includes 9/11 and the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Yet he was joyful.
As he gained the ego strength to admit his own faults, he brought his shadow into his work (he was in Jungian therapy.) The sordid details of his betrayal of his first wife Renee Shafransky, who was unaware that he had fathered a son with Kathie Russo, became It's a Slippery Slope, the first of his monologues to elicit hate mail. In a radio interview, he said this was progress - not expecting the audience to love him unconditionally was a sign that his therapy was working. He could handle some hate.
As he gained the ego strength to admit his own faults, he brought his shadow into his work (he was in Jungian therapy.) The sordid details of his betrayal of his first wife Renee Shafransky, who was unaware that he had fathered a son with Kathie Russo, became It's a Slippery Slope, the first of his monologues to elicit hate mail. In a radio interview, he said this was progress - not expecting the audience to love him unconditionally was a sign that his therapy was working. He could handle some hate.
In recent years his monologues centered on the family he created with Russo; he sounded content with their life in Sag Harbor, New York. He bade a reluctant goodbye to the childlike status he enjoyed in his first marriage, and learned to love being a nurterer himself, fascinated by the distinct personalities of their three children. But onstage, when he said "things are going smoothly," he knocked on the wooden table.
Perhaps his final despair was such a profound shock to his public because we forgot to trust the tale and not the teller. Art after all is artifice, no matter how confessional it seems. Even his wife admits that she had no idea of the depth of pain he was in. In the end he became a tragic hero - tragic because of his great stature as an artist, heroic because he used all of his power in his struggle to live. Catastrophic events over which he had no control and against which he battled mightily for years might have overwhelmed a lesser person sooner.
Perhaps his final despair was such a profound shock to his public because we forgot to trust the tale and not the teller. Art after all is artifice, no matter how confessional it seems. Even his wife admits that she had no idea of the depth of pain he was in. In the end he became a tragic hero - tragic because of his great stature as an artist, heroic because he used all of his power in his struggle to live. Catastrophic events over which he had no control and against which he battled mightily for years might have overwhelmed a lesser person sooner.
