The Irish Times - Saturday, March 13, 2004
New Yorker whose work reflected his darker side
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SPALDING GRAY:  Gray, whose body has been retrieved from the East River in New York two months after he disappeared from his Manhattan flat, was a prism of extreme behaviour in the world around him.
He walked so many edges you could be grateful he lasted as long as he did - or suspect he is not dead at all, that this is an elaborate scheme allowing him to attend his own funeral and write a monologue about it.
The scenario would be vintage Gray - he was part social scientist, as well as his own guinea pig - but not, from the tone of family reports, the man he had become since a car accident in Ireland in 2001. He suffered leg injuries that required extensive surgery and left him humourless and depressed.
After his hired car was struck by a van, he claims he had to wait an hour before an ambulance arrived. In Life Interrupted, he was scathing about the hospital conditions in Ireland, where he had performed a number of times, and expressed his belief that his treatment was below acceptable standards. Since the accident, he had walked with a limp and had been periodically depressed.
But he was also reported to have attempted suicide in 2002, and was said to have been on anti-depressant drugs. Ironically, this decline came at a time when, after a series of long- and short-term relationships, he had married Kathleen Russo, had two children, settled in scenic North Haven, Long Island, and taken up the surprisingly conventional pastime of skiing.
However witty Gray's work was, there was always a dark undercurrent in his dozen or so monologues, and a quirky sensibility in his 30-plus film roles. In his book, Impossible Vacation (1992), he recalled a suicidal moment during his teens, when he considered jumping out of a window. "I figured I'd just break a leg or something, and end up in a cast for the rest of the summer ... Then I also realised that Mom [who committed suicide at the age of 52] wouldn't be able to give me any attention, because she was cracking up and needed all of it for herself."
Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, as a Christian scientist, Gray was plagued by dyslexia, and was in boarding school for two extra years before attending Emerson College, Boston. He gravitated towards avant-garde theatre in New York in 1967, and was a founder of the progressive Wooster Group. During this period, he could not afford to own a television, and found that giving a chronicle of his day gave shape to his life: "The ritual of that was extremely satisfying."
His monologues grew out of improvisation, starting with Sex And Death To The Age Of 14 in 1979, but his breakthrough came after a minor role, as the US consul in The Killing Fields (1984), which yielded the monologue Swimming To Cambodia, later filmed by Jonathan Demme in a work that consisted almost entirely of Gray sitting, standing and talking. The play focused on the film-making process, but also explored US responsibility for the ravages in Cambodia and truths about Gray's darkest personal secrets.
Gray also made numerous brief film appearances, including Beaches (1988), Beyond Rangoon (1996), Kate And Leopold (2001) and The Papier Mache Chase (2003), plus the recurring role of Dr Jack Miller in the American TV sitcom The Nanny, to maintain what he called "horizontal celebrity" - a low, but consistent, level of recognition that allowed him to support his family. At times, he would arrive on the set of a high-profile Hollywood film with his co-stars forbidding him to portray them in his monologues.
In fact, the monologues rarely involved anything so conventional as a film star. Rather, they constituted a fringe history of 1980s and '90s America. Many were picaresque travelogues over many locales, from lavish lunches with vapid Hollywood executives, in Monster In The Box, to interviewing the Dalai Lama for a Buddhist publication.
Gray often cast himself as a passive figure, simply reporting what had happened to him. But he admitted that he sought out strange experiences to report on.
They could be clubs of UFO watchers or native American peyote rituals. And though he embodied the stereotype of the self-absorbed New Yorker - looking at the world through the lens of one who had known intensive psychotherapy, fad diets and mind-expanding drugs - his pursuit of a story had a selflessness that often put the amiable Gray in harm's way.
Gray admitted that his work was not scrupulously factual. The more fantastical manifestations of his neuroses - during one anxiety attack, he claimed, he sweated through his shoes and left wet footprints - were often fabricated. "I am interested in what happens to the so-called facts after they have passed through performance and registered on my memory," he once said.
Kathleen and their sons, Forrest and Theo, survive him.
Spalding Gray: born June 5th, 1941; died before March 7th, 2004