Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell apparently had a six month run off-Broadway a few years ago. I wasn't aware of that when I snagged tickets to see it as part os PS 122's COIL Festival. What I did know was that Gray was best known for full-length theatrical monologues about his own life. I'd read a few--Gray's Anatomy and Swimming to Cambodia stand out most. But I'd never seen him perform. And never will since he killed himself a few years ago.
For COIL, four actors are performing pieces from his monologues combined with pieces from his unpublished and unperformed journals, each focusing on one aspect of his life: love, family, adventure, and journals. A rotating actor is standing in as Career. Last night, that was done by Oscar nominee David Strathairn who, I'll note, is way more attractive in real life than any man in his 60s has any right to be.
Regardless, it was interesting to watch five actors perform different pieces of one man's life, trying to draw one entire picture. Hazelle Goodman, reading about adventure, was a stand-out: laugh out loud funny recounting a trip to a Native American sweat ritual. She brought a sense of enthusiasm to each section that felt authentic and real. Others, like the usually unbelievable Kathleen Chalfant, showed a bit more effort in trying to become one with the late writer.
What's so interesting to me about Gray is that he lived the ultimate examined life. His work was brutally honest, and he seemingly had no shame, or at least no need to hide behind that shame. He was the ultimate over-sharer. Nothing, it seemed, was off-limits. For someone from a generation known for feeling ever-compelled to talk about themselves publicly, he's sort of a spiritual godfather. One gets the sense that he would have looooved blogging.
His suicide is dealt with near the end of the show. After a car accident in Ireland, he is left with titanium over the front of his skull, bone shards in his frontal lobe, 21 shock therapy treatments that later doctors said he never should have had, and a severe depression that seems likely it sprung from the brain damage, though his family history didn't help: his mother killed herself years before.
The show is co-directed by his ex-wife, and it seems fitting that in processing her husband's death, she too turned to the theater to make sense of a life. And in as much as one can summarize a life in two hours of stage time, she seems to have done a fantastic job. It's funny and moving, and it presents a rich overview of one man trying to understand everything.
This is the first show I saw at the COIL Festival this year. It and the Public's Under the Radar festival are going on concurrently. All the shows are cheap, and of them all, this was the least experimental. In other words, I'm probably going to be seeing a bunch of stuff over the next week. And shit's gonna get real obscure on here for a bit. I hope to see something brilliant and can almost guarantee that I'll see at least one show that I despise. Sadly, the site-specific Green Eyes at the Hudson Hotel won't be one since it sold out (it's in a hotel room, so only 20 people at a time can go). Likewise, unless I get in off a waitlist, I won't get a chance to see the Belarus Free Theater do Being Harold Pinter which I'm sad about because it's gotten great reviews, and the company has apparently been bravely fighting authorities for years to spread their message about their country's political dysfunction--two members were arrested only weeks ago. Regardless, updates to come!
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