TIMES - TUE 17 FEB 2004, Page Times2 18 

His dark materials;Spalding Gray;Arts 
By Clive Davis 

AFTER HIS MYSTERY DISAPPEARANCE IN JANUARY, SPALDING GRAY'S CAREER
SPENT EXORCISING HIS DEMONS ON STAGE APPEARS TO BE OVER, SAYS CLIVE
DAVIS
FOR days his friends and admirers clung to the hope that he had
simply embarked on some particularly eccentric field trip. Instinct
must have told them otherwise.
When the brilliant writer, actor and monologist Spalding Gray
disappeared from his home on Long Island last month, the fear that he
might have committed suicide cannot have been far from anyone's
thoughts. The 62-year-old performer -whose capering neuroses earned
him the label "the Wasp Woody Allen" -had been struggling against
severe depression for many months, the result of injuries sustained
in a near-fatal road accident in 2001.
He had already tried to kill himself on more than one occasion in
the months after the crash. As time passes, and no confirmed
sightings emerge, it becomes harder and harder to imagine him ever
again striding out on to a stage and launching into one of his
tangled yet unfailingly lucid and humorous meditations on the human
condition. Unless there is a sudden, Mark Twain-like denouement, it
seems increasingly likely that Gray has written the final chapter of
a career based on the intense study of his own inner demons.
His one-man shows, such as Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a
Box, were compelling and utterly original. The fact that he would
deliver his monologues while seated demurely behind a desk, like some
cosmic newsreader, added to the power of his performances. By sharing
his innermost thoughts with an audience of strangers, he appeared to
keep the shadows at bay. If Gray was never the easiest of souls to
deal with, life and fantasy somehow maintained a fragile balance.
All that changed when he and a group of family and friends went on a
holiday to Ireland two and a half years ago. Even before he left on
the trip -arranged for his 60th birthday -he was said to have been
filled with a vague foreboding. The New York acquaintance who lent
him the holiday home died of a heart attack shortly before the group
set off; when they arrived they found the locals preoccupied by the
fear of the spread of "mad cow" disease. Disaster struck almost
immediately.
Driving home from dinner, the party's car was involved in a head-on
crash in a country lane. Gray suffered serious head and hip injuries.
His family later complained that inadequate hospital treatment in
Ireland compounded his condition.
Back home in New York, one operation followed another; doctors
prescribed all manner of medication. An avid skier, Gray was now
barely able to sustain any form of exercise. "I have lost my sense of
humour since the accident," Gray told a reporter. "I get up to walk,
and I limp and I remember the accident."
He eventually sought treatment with the renowned neurologist Oliver
Sacks, who is said to have warned him that full recovery would be a
five-year process. As ever, Gray managed to draw some form of
inspiration from his misfortune, distilling his experiences into a
new monologue, entitled Life Interrupted, that he began to hone in
public last autumn. His mental condition, however, remained fragile.
He was no stranger to illness. In his 1994 piece, Gray's Anatomy, he
delivered a mesmerising account of his efforts to find a cure for a
rare degenerative eye disorder.
Repelled by what he saw as the cold mechanics of conventional
medicine, he went on a hilarious global quest to find an alternative
therapy ("I want magic and miracles. I don't want medicine!"). The
director Steven Soderbergh later adapted the monologue for cinema
audiences. In 1987 Jonathan Demme had performed a similar function on
Swimming to Cambodia, the monologue that brought Gray to the
attention of international audiences.
Having started out as a straight actor in the 1960s, he changed
direction after collaborating on an avant-garde theatre work inspired
in part by his reaction to his mother's decision, at the age of 52,
to take her own life. Her death continued to haunt him. Years later,
when working with Soderbergh on the feature film King of the Hill, he
was unsettled by the experience of playing a character who commits
suicide. As he later confessed to an interviewer: "At the time Steven
Soderbergh cast me in that movie, I was having a lot of suicide
fantasies. I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself
because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasising
that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave."
Until the accident in Ireland, Gray had managed to balance reality
and fantasy.
Yet even at the height of his success, he had pondered the dangers
inherent in his particular form of public introspection.
"Anecdoting is a defence and it's dangerous," he explained. "I have
to be careful with it. It's a hazard of my trade. I'm trying to work
on that in therapy - privatising my life. I'm addicted to the joy of
anecdote, the structure, the way it makes life feel cosy and
meaningful.
"I think I experience more chaos than the average person, and this
is why so many writers drink in the morning -they're faced with the
abyss...I think writers drink to shut down memory because memory is
relentless. Everything I encounter during the day sets off
associations about the past. It sets my mind going until my mind is
in a painful place."
Barring a miracle, it seems he may now have gone to the darkest
place of all.
Thankfully, we can still bask in the light and grace and wit of his
legacy.
Spalding Gray turned himself into a genuine work of art.
THE OPENING OF SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA
SO it was our first day off in a long time and there were about 130
of us out by the pool trying to get a little rest and relaxation, and
the Thai waiters were running and jumping over hedges to bring us
"Kloster! More Kloster!" Everyone was ordering Kloster beer. No one
was ordering the Singal because someone had said that Singal, which
is exported to the United States, has formaldehyde in it. The waiters
were running and jumping over hedges because they couldn't get to us
fast enough. They were running and jumping and smiling -not a silly
smile but a profound smile, a deep smile....The Thais have a word,
sanug, which, loosely translated, means "fun". And they never do
anything that isn't sanug -if it isn't sanug they won't touch it.
Some say that the Thais are the nicest people that money can buy,
because they like to have fun. They know how to have fun and, perhaps
due to their very permissive strain of Buddhism, they don't have to
suffer for it after they have it. 
Caption:  "Capering neuroses": the writer, actor and monologist Spalding 
Gray who, it is feared, may have committed suicide
Section:  FEATURES
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