The darker sides of Spalding Gray

Book Review

October 19, 2011|By Adam Langer

Spalding Grays personal writing provides insight into how he constructed… (paula court )

THE JOURNALS OF SPALDING GRAY

Edited by Nell Casey

Knopf, 340 pp., illustrated, $28.85

I saw Spalding Gray up close just once. It happened on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, when much of Lower Manhattan was open only to rescue workers and emergency vehicles. The nearest I could get to the site of the Twin Towers was Houston Street. As I headed toward a set of police barricades, he walked right past me - instantly recognizable in his flannel work shirt, with his wavy mane of gray hair.

I counted Gray’s monologues “Swimming to Cambodia,’’ “Terrors of Pleasure,’’ and “Monster in a Box’’ among the most entertaining and rewarding experiences I ever had in a theater. There, less than a mile from ground zero, I wondered how this great American storyteller would wring drama and humor out of the attacks, but felt certain that he would. After all, here was a man who found dark comedy in the story of his own mother’s suicide and his fear that he too would take his own life.

Gray never did write that 9/11 monologue I was imagining, and three years later his body was found washed up on the Brooklyn waterfront. The evidence strongly suggested that Gray, 62, committed suicide by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry. He left behind two children, a wife, a legacy of brilliant performances that helped pave the way for the essays and monologues of David Sedaris and the cast of public radio’s “This American Life,’’ and more than 5,000 pages of journals.

One of the most disturbing yet insightful aspects of reading “The Journals of Spalding Gray,“ Nell Casey’s 340-page distillation of Gray’s unpublished, personal writing, is learning how magnificently and artfully Gray constructed his appealing onstage and onscreen persona out of his own obsessions, neuroses, and troubled history.

The journals begin in 1967 when the 25-year-old Gray was working as an actor in Houston and end with the sporadic, disjointed, and frequently heart-rending, desperate entries from his final years. For his monologues, Gray drew upon seminal events and themes that are detailed in his journals: his mother’s death, his own suicidal fantasies, his marriages to Renée Shafransky and Kathleen Russo, his sexual fixations, his acting (particularly in the film “The Killing Fields’’), and his hypochondria. But he did so selectively, creating a character that was a good deal more sympathetic than the manipulative, competitive, and self-absorbed individual who emerges from these pages.