Conversation with actor Spalding Gray is akin to the flow of his rambling, unpredictable monologues: pleasantry laced with ironic wit and touches of Eastern philosophizing, all wrapped in an enigma that makes him one of the more inimitable personalities in American theater.
It`s something of a colloquial version of flying to another planet: While there, you`d best adapt and thrive in Grayspeak or lose consciousness and suffocate. And when you`re finished, there`s a light-headed feeling of just having returned to Earth.
”I did make a porno movie,” the hardly beefy Gray admits, when asked to confirm a recent column item in the Village Voice about a blue picture he made in 1976, ”The Farmer`s Daughters.”
”But it`s no secret. I`ve dealt with it in monologues. I`d just returned from India and was recuperating from a nervous collapse. I didn`t want to perform or write or act, just throw myself into new situations. I`d been an art monk, and I wanted to throw myself into the profane world.
”That was one way,” he continues. ”I also traveled cross-country on a Greyhound bus and got myself arrested and thrown in jail in Las Vegas. Making the porno movie was real work and a real bore, and not much money. You have to be incredibly narcissistic and exhibitionistic to do it.
Gray returns with a pair of brand new one-man efforts, ”Terrors of Pleasure” and ”Monster in a Box,” in separate programs rotating Tuesday through Sunday at the Goodman Theatre, the first solo act to take over the mainstage since Lily Tomlin nearly a decade ago.
Gray and the Goodman go way back: He brought ”Swimming to Cambodia,”
Parts 1 and 2, to the Briar Street Theatre as a Goodman guest in 1985. The monologues eventually were published and filmed to wide acclaim.
The new pieces are installments in what Gray considers a continuing verbal autobiography. ”Terrors” interrelates his somewhat Gothic experiences buying and refurbishing an upstate New York cabin with his first forays into Hollywood.
Of the new work, Gray reports: ”It`s my most accessible so far and my most alchemistic, in the sense of turning manure into gold. I kept a journal through my experiences with the house just to keep my sanity, and the monologue came out of it.”
On the second work, ”Monster,” Gray paraphrases philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and says it deals with ”the dizziness that comes from too much possibility.”
”I`ve been working on an autobiographical novel (`Impossible Vacation`)
for three years, and it still isn`t finished. There`s a 1,600-page manuscript now on my editor`s desk, and the monologue deals with my attempts to finish this book amidst movies coming out, film offers interfering with my time and my buckling under that weight.”
”Monster” brings up the string of Hollywood roles that came his way after ”The Killing Fields” and ”Cambodia,” more recent parts in
”Beaches,” ”Clara`s Harp,” ”Stars and Bars” and ”True Stories,”
roles that for the most part give barely a hint of the perplexing, wryly funny man revealed in his stage monologues.
”Most people in Hollywood get cast in a way that matches their inner and outer selves. I don`t. I look like a WASP Brahmin, and my image reads that way.
”But what`s inside me are the monologues. When I go to Hollywood, I don`t expect a whole lot. But I like that kind of work; it`s like vacation, being on location with interesting people in nice places and being well-treated. And three weeks of work gets me a year of good health insurance.”
He doesn`t write the monologues but speaks into a recorder and then performs them from memory, changing them with each outing. He has an abstruse theory of memory to go along with that theory of work: coins piling on coins, he says, with each repetition a memory of the last performance as much as the original event.
”I found monology by accident,” he says. ”I`d never heard the word until critics began applying words like it and `performance art` to my work.
”About the only description I ever found completely acceptable came from a 10-year-old girl. I talked to her afterward, and when I asked why she came, she told me, `My daddy told me I had to come and see the talking man.`
”You can be killed by categorization, and if monology becomes passe, I might be written off as out of date.
”But I`ll buy the little girl`s line: the Talking Man. I just hope, sometime before my obituary, they make it `The Talking Man-An American Original.` ”
No problem.
