Spalding Gray’s Unbearable Lightness
Interview by Sylvie Myerson and Vid Jain
Introduction by Sylvie Myerson
Although he is also an actor and a writer, Spalding Gray is primarily know for improvisational monologues such as Swimming in Cambodia or Gray’s Anatomy in which he delves into his neuroses and anxieties, bringing episodes of his personal life to an audience with all the intensity of a live performance. These high-energy, and often hilarious, reflections on the absurdity of human existence as seen through the eyes of a New England WASP crossed with an NYC artist are performed while sitting down at a desk, interrupted from time to time by sips from a water-glass. In may of 1998, Gray released a CD of It’s a Slippery Slope (Mercury Records) which he described to us as a watershed work. In this monologue the performer dives deep to confront some very dark moments, including consequences of his own actions (his betrayal of, and ensuing break-up with, his first wife and long-time collaborator Renéé Shafransky). Nevertheless, Gray resurfaces from this dark period through a dual initiation into the joys of skiing and fatherhood (His lover, Kathie Russo, gives birth to Forrest, their first child). Gray, after a long period of denial, finds himself propelled into family life. Several years later, Gray and Russo are married and living out on Long Island with Marisa, Kathie’s daughter from a previous relationship, Forrest, and their second son Leo. All of these life changes inevitably wind their way into the work. The current monologue, entitled Morning, Noon and Night reflects these major transitions. Spalding Gray spoke to Sandbox about the process behind his monologues and how they allow him to map out his existence.
The Process
How did your monologues take off from your earlier work as an actor with the Wooster Group?
I was never an actor with the Wooster Group, I was a performer. I was an actor with Richard Schechner’s performance group. With the Wooster Group I only acted or performed myself. I wasn’t playing any role, we were really doing my autobiography. Essentially, the watershed piece was Rumstick Road because it was there that I was telling my life story and coming down to the audience and saying, “My name is Spalding Gray and this is my life.” That was in 1977. When I split from the Wooster Group it was clear to me that I was doing direct drift autobiographical narrative and so I, in 1979, sat behind a table at the Performing Garage and did the first monologue. The process that I started then, 19 years ago, is the same now. That is, I work from an outline, just speaking memory, then tape-recording that, listening to it and redoing it so that it evolves in front of an audience. I don’t rewrite the monologues, so there’s no text beforehand. The first performance is the first writing.
So the work really evolves from performance to performance.
It goes through what I think of as three distinctive evolutionary periods. One is thinking out loud with the audience, finding the structure with them, telling the story for the first time. That goes on for a while. Then I begin to set it. It sets itself, that’s part two. Then part three is where it becomes set and almost lyrical. In other words, I start by improvising and then close in.
How do you decide when you’ve reached stage three?
It seems lyrical, it flows just like water running downhill finally finding its riverbed. It tells me by its rhythm and its lyricism when it approaches musical poetry… and you feel completely in sync with the audience.
So you really take into consideration their reactions.
Well, it’s a dialogue but consideration not in an intellectual way but in an intuitive way, having worked in front of an audience for thirty years. Sometimes they’re teaching me what they need to laugh at and what’s funny and other times we’re just organically working together. It’s reciprocal. If they find something funny that I didn’t know was funny I will play that line for them.
You mentioned before that you don’t actually write your monologues but perform them, record them and then have them transcribed. Do you write at any stage of your work?
Yeah, I write between the cracks. Slippery Slope wasn’t long enough when it was transcribed so I wrote in stuff that wasn’t included in the monologue. I did write Impossible Vacation. That’s the only book I’ve ever written but that pretty much cured me because I found the thing suffocating. I got an ulcerated knuckle from it and I was alone all the time, bored… I hated it, I hated the process.
You really missed the interaction with the audience.
Yeah, and also when you’re writing you can’t do three things at once. You have to put your eyebrows, your eyes, your breath all into the book. You have to create a world in the book. A John Steinbeck can’t be in the book. There’s something abstract, there’s something torn away from you. It loses its prana or energy and turns, basically, into henscratching.
But wouldn’t that also apply to the print version of your monologues? Couldn’t you say that print doesn’t give the reader the full experience of the work?
It doesn’t, no, it’s just a record and I’m glad people buy it and read it for that but the only event, really, is the live performance. That’s what I’m most about.
The Audience’s Laughter
Your monologues seem to have a lot to do with expressing personal pain yet the audience laughs at the moments which are the most intensely painful and also the most climactic. Isn’t this kind of odd?
I don’t laugh at myself, so when other people laugh it’s always a weird phenomenon to me. It’s just an enormous release. I expect some of it’s recognition. I don’t analyze it or judge it, but there’s been some very odd times. There’s often a lot of laughter when I say that my mother killed herself. Someone stopped me in San Francisco, a young woman on the street, and told me how she liked the monologue Monster in A Box and I said, “Oh, good. Why did you like it?” She said, “Well, actually, I can’t say that I liked it. I’m more confused by it. I’m not from New York City and I don’t understand why people would laugh at someone’s suicide.” And all my response could be was, “Well, I don’t either.” [laughs]
So you don’t set out making people laugh?
No, I don’t, though more and more I’m better at it, I understand where the laughs are. But when I sat down to do my first monologue I expected it to be a serious event and the audience taught me my sense of humor. They teach me what’s funny and sometimes I play it for them. Actually, there’s really two beings that we have… being for ourselves and being for others. My private self with my family is one thing and my being for others is often this thing that facilitates laughter.
We’re always surprised by how much NY audiences laugh because if you go to other countries you’ll find that people’s reactions are very different.
Listen, I played It’s a Slippery Slope at the Dublin Festival in October and they were silent as they were in Perth, Australia. I mean, they were listening, but they were very sober and very quiet. It really threw me and I had to learn to play the material in a totally different way.
How did you do that?
I said, “I don’t want to go on but I gotta go on.” Why do you go on? You go on and tell the story just for the sake of the story. Just as the story in its purest form and I learned a lot about it that way. You rediscover a story. You get pulled out of the routines in a very fresh way.
Do you think American audiences are just looking for comedy?
Well, most people, because of television, seem to connect with a level of anti-hero… a self-deprecating Woody Allenesque character which I’m putting out.
You said you don’t judge the laughter. Do you just keep it at a distance or does it have any kind of therapeutic effect on you?
The laughter is therapeutic for me because I don’t laugh so the audience laughs for me. They redeem what seems like a black and dark situation through that laugh and it’s redemptive. I feel that I’m giving a good orgasm because I see laughter as just as beneficial and therapeutic as a good orgasm.
It’s a release.
Yeah, and it’s a connection.
Life Vs. Art
Your work involves intensely autobiographical material. How do you maintain boundaries between your work and your life?
That’s a good question that I don’t know all the answers to. For Slippery Slope, which I didn’t think I’d ever do, I was in therapy for a long time before I started going public, so there was a sorting out of what belonged in the therapist’s office.
What do you mean? Were you in therapy to do the piece?
I was in therapy to get to a place where I could. I found the material unspeakable so we began to sort out what could be spoken and what would be private. We were making boundaries, though I didn’t know that at the time.
So you didn’t start out with really clear boundaries.
No, no. I’m not a big boundary person. I have either problems with them or no problems with them. I don’t know which it is. I mean, it’s only a problem when it begins to hurt other people, to invade them.
Do your loved ones ever resent being portrayed in your work?
I expect Renéé Shafransky was very bothered by It’s a Slippery Slope. I never heard about it. I got a few hate letters but they weren’t from loved ones. Everyone I’ve been intimate with always knows what I’m going to talk about before I do it. I sound it out with them.
Didn’t you have a problem with your father?
My father and step-mother came to see Sex and Death Until the Age 14 at Brown and they were just completely obtuse, no reaction… “We wish you didn’t have to say those words.” “Something and Death,” he called it. He couldn’t say “sex” in front of me. I come from a very repressed background, so that’s one reason for wanting to talk so much.
Have you ever considered doing work that is not autobiographical?
No, I can’t make a story up. I don’t fictionalize well, it’s not in my nature. Fiction isn’t even a temptation because it’s not in me to do it. I’m not interested in contrived structure. I’m really interested in mapping my life because it grounds me. Life already feels like an arbitrary elusive thing… you’re going to live only once and die… so mapping it through the monologues is very therapeutic because it gives you the illusion of being here. It gives you a grounding, an anchor.
But isn’t a monologue already an artificial structure?
Yeah, it is. It’s slightly removed, but it’s still a closer reflection than a fictional work. I have no satisfaction in working up a story. It just doesn’t give me any sense of completion.
You’ve described yourself as a collage artist. Could you explain in what sense?
Well, it’s cutting up memory into pieces… a collage of family photos… I think of myself as a collage artist, more than say an autobiographic journalist, because I am constantly cutting and pasting my favorite pieces.
It’s a Slippery Slope: Skiing and Fatherhood
It’ s a Slippery Slope is your first work in which there is a moment of utter happiness that doesn’t seem to be tarnished by immediate anxiety. Is this something new in your life?
I hope the monologue says that. I was going to say it’s a watershed monologue but it’s a watershed life-experience and the monologue reflects it… a combination of skiing and fatherhood, really.
Why is it a watershed work?
Probably a couple of things. One is allowing myself to express a wider range of feelings that I would almost call deep feelings at times, but to also risk silences and tones of sadness that were less present in the other monologues. The other monologues are more like the hysterical victim. Also, I am no longer yelling, “Help! Mom, I’m drowning!” I’m not turning the audience into a mother as much as I’m saying, “I am a man and I did these things.” I’m taking responsibilities for these shadow actions… betrayal… I knew that would have consequences for the audience, that they would have reactions and they did. When I was being interviewed by Terrie Gross on National Public Radio she said, “Oh my goodness, Spalding! You’re a bad man!”, and I said, “Yeah, and I’m also a good man.” I’m doing both sides. That has got me to, I think, a more mature place as a performer.
Do you think it’s a more honest monologue?
More honest in the sense that it covers more dimensions, so closer to the truth of the whole character. The others are also honest but they’re reporting on one note which is the passive, manic reactor.
Did the audience respond differently to this piece?
What was different was that they needed to laugh so consistently that there would be a lot of nervous laughter at odd and inappropriate places, like knee jerk laughter. There was also some hissing women in Chicago.
How do you think this change is going to carry over into your next monologue?
The new monologue is called Morning, Noon and Night and I think it’s a monologue really coming into the light in the sense of having gone through the trauma and crisis of the unexpected birth of my first son and the breakup of my long relationship… Coming through that into the birth of my second son. It’s one day in my life in Sag Harbor, Long Island. It’s my being present at that birth which I wasn’t at the other, so it’s truly the initiation into fatherhood because I helped deliver the baby.
Oh, you did!
Well, I wasn’t pulling his head out but I was certainly pulling Kathie’s leg back while the nurse took her other leg! I cut the umbilical cord and was there for the whole 12 hour event. That was a completely different thing than the other birth, not ever having gone through that process… One moment Kathie’s pregnant and I walk out, eighteen months later I come back and I’m holding the product in my arms. It’s very unreal and I never really thought I would go through with a woman’s pregnancy. It always seems completely freakville to me. I surprised myself!
Do you feel like you’ve grown up through this pregnancy?
Yeah, yeah, I suppose the final act of growing up is to accept one’s mortality, which is always a daily struggle for me.
There’s been such a radical change in your life, do you feel that that’s also bringing about a radical change in your work?
Yeah, because I work slower and I’m not driven. I used to have to perform, like a feeling that I couldn’t breathe… it would be smothering if I wasn’t out there making that new monologue and getting that audience response and constantly being on the road. Now it’s more balanced. There is an enormous amount of private time, private by choice and private by necessity, because it can’t be processed fast enough for the story. I used to live much more in fantasy and what Kierkegaard referred to as dizziness that comes from too much possibility. I was always thinking, “I could be there or ever there…” because nothing was really grounding me. The one-on-one relationship with Renée wasn’t enough, I was just too airy, and the children have done that, you know. When I think of all my monologues I think of two titles I could lump them under. The first is The Terrors of Pleasure, which was one of my monologues but you could call all my monologues The Terrors of Pleasure, and the other is not my title but it sums it up: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That is the all time great title for me. The lightness is both fantastic but unbearable.
Your earlier material seems to be so focused on death and the absurdity of existence. Why is that?
I think that that’s in everyone’s consciousness. I’m very influenced by the Existentialists, particularly Sartre. I think that Night is definitely going to be a meditation on that and it’s probably going to be prewritten to make sure I get it right. But that’s always the bottom line for me. I mean, it’s simply the underpinning to all existence.
Play
Is play an important element in your work?
Absolutely. I play with memory. So here’s an example of playing around… This morning I took a pad because Kathie said to me, “When you’re doing the new monologue Morning, Noon and Night, you really should put in the section on genetic counseling.” Because we had to go for genetic counseling and during that we remembered that we have a lot of nuts in either family, a lot of manic-depression. Then instead of going back and thinking, “What did Kathie say? What did I say?” because I have no record of that, I’ll sit down and start to play around with a fictional growth out of that situation. That’s where I get playful. So I was writing all about my grandmother who had a Tourette’s-like nervous tic: “I was so concerned with my mother’s mania and suicide that I forgot that her mother had Tourette’s, and then I forgot that her mother’s sister, her aunt, was a dowser and was so affected by the full moon that she eventually filled her pockets with stones and walked into the Narrangansett bay.” Now that’s playfulness that enters into the real situation. You might call it hyperbole… it’s also auto-fiction. Also, I love playing with words in a Joycean way. The more I play the monologue the lighter the language gets, the more playful and less literal it gets. So I’m always playing it in front of the audience because it’s never set. I’ve always had the notion that I was fooling around with it and that to not do that would cause it to be too weighty and it would be the Unbearable Weight of Being.
Spalding Gray