On “Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell”

Spalding Gray was one of the most influential artists of his generation.  He was a beloved storyteller and a pioneer of contemporary theater as we know it today.  He wrote in his personal journals about how he never felt that a lot of the theater companies he worked with in the early part of his career would challenge their audiences enough.  He didn’t believe, at first, that theater had a revolutionary role in creating change and generating political thought.  It was understood that there were plays and material out there that could do that, but nobody seemed to be interested in putting those plays up.  Theater companies had more of an interest in entertaining their audiences than presenting a thought provoking challenge.  So, he did something about that.  Throughout the 60’s and 70’s Spalding and many other influential playwrights, actors and directors delved into the world of experimental theater bringing about a new way of performing plays. 

Several experimental theater companies such as The Wooster Group, a company that Gray was an active part of and helped him to develop and produce his first 8 monologues, changed the way the American audience viewed theater.  Throughout the city performances were over the top, full of poetry, music, dance, performance art and improv.  And some were focused, purposeful plays that used more conventional methods.  Yet still, once again in theater’s history, the rules had changed.  The bold quality of these shows was reminiscent of the gritty origins of theater itself.  Audiences were drawn in and made to feel like they were part of the process.  It was a wild old time and one that my Theater and Western Civilization Professor practically scoffed at while teaching us about it.  He would take an “oh, those damn kids and their long hair and pot” approach, revealing himself to have been a total square.  But I, for one, appreciate how this kind of theater made everything better in the long run because now, people aren’t afraid to play with the oldest of texts be it the Greeks, Moliere or Shakespeare and make it their own.  Of course you cannot play with Marlow and Shakespeare’s meter and you cannot perform a Greek play without incorporating the five elements of Greek theater without showing a great disrespect, in my opinion.  But you CAN put these texts into any context you’d like and wrap them in the most bizarre of packages because of the moves these people made to make theater even more universal than it already was. 

I’m no expert on Spalding Gray.  I’ve read some of his stuff over the years and I remember my High School Musical Theater teacher showing us “Swimming to Cambodia” in class and later on at University being handed a photocopied section of it by my Acting II teacher to be memorized and performed by the next class.  I still have that sheet of paper in my monologue collection.  It was one of the biggest challenges handed to me as a young actress because the material was like no other I had ever seen.  I was no stranger to interactive theatre, which was unconventional for sure.  But learning to act a narrative piece, to simply tell a story, was a whole new world for me.           

Spalding Gray was seriously mentally ill.  He struggled with bipolar disorder and lived with the looming reminder of his mother’s suicide at the age of 52.  His journals reveal his fear that he, too, may have the same fate.  And sure enough, after a horrific car wreck in Ireland that nearly killed him, the stress and recovery from that experience wore on his mental health a great deal and led to his suicide in 2004.  He wrote to his wife Kathie, which she discovered after the fact, that suicide was the only viable option for him because the idea of living out his days in an institution was simply unbearable.  I came into work one day in January of 2004 and opened the paper to find a desperate plea from Kathie Russo for everyone to please look for Spalding.  He had gone missing and no one had seen him for days.  My heart sank.  I knew all too well about the harsh reality of the fatality rate of Spalding’s illness.  A few months later his body was found, washed up on the shores of the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.  And not long after that, his personal journals were opened and read for the first time.  There are 270 notebooks filled with his daily thoughts, musings and memories.  These are not fictional monologues and stories, these are his life.  And out of these notebooks came an opportunity like no other.

What has come of this discovery is a play titled “Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell.”  My best friend Brenda and I went to see it last night at the Minetta Lane Theater.  An extra bonus for us was that the guest star for this week’s performance was none other than the fabulous David Boreanaz of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, “Angel” and “Bones”.  I am so glad I waited a little bit to see this show because seeing him in it was such a treat.  And he read very well.  The cast is made up of five actors.  They read from his journals, mostly from memory and embody the stories he tells, making them their own.  No one does an impression of him; the performances are simply acting in its purest form.  His spirit is very much alive and brilliantly cast onto the stage with a set built up on platforms that rise to different levels with hundreds of notebooks piled all over the stage.  From the ceiling hangs hundreds of typed and written-on pieces of paper, tacked together just so, creating a web of thoughts and stories, a mind if you will.  Microphones are strategically placed around the stage, a reflection of his love and utility of that instrument.  And down stage right sits a desk with a microphone and a boom box, a replica of his set for the monologue “Morning, Noon and Night.”    

No one explains where this show came from better than Kathie Russo herself (taken from the production’s website):

“SPALDING GRAY: Stories Left to Tell came about when Theatre Communications Group republished Swimming to Cambodia in May 2004.  TCG held a reading for the book's release at the Union Square Barnes & Noble where Roger Rosenblatt, Reno, Kate Valk, Eric Bogosian and Bob Holman all read excerpts.  It was a "light-bulb moment" for me as I sat there listening to all these other voices read Spalding's work and receiving an enthusiastic response from the audience.  That night made me realize more than ever that Spalding was a brilliant writer.  His words, not his own performance, were now taking center stage.

Spalding would have been 65 on June 5, 2006. In honor of his birthday, I began planning a celebrations reading of his work for around that time at Performance Space 122, where a workshop version of the show, entitled Leftover Stories to Tell, received its premiere. When UCLA heard about it, they also booked it for a week in June.  We even got the mayor to proclaim June 5th Spalding Gray Day in New York City.”

I was blown away by this incredible tribute.  His journal entries range from side-splitting hilarity to humility and finally, to tragedy.  Listening to his final journal entry will be marked as a pivotal moment in my life.  It is a reminder that we are blessed to have had such a great mind among us.

For more info: The website

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