Spalding Gray's America (review)

Reviewed by: Spalding Gray's America Marc Silverstein William W. Demastes . Spalding Gray's America. New York: Limelight, 2008. Pp. xxv + 270, illustrated. $19.95 (Pb). Spalding Gray first made an impact on the experimental New York theatre scene in 1970, when he joined Richard Schechner's Performance Group. In [End Page 492] 1975, he co-founded and was a major force behind the early work of the Wooster Group. He began performing the monologues that mark his signal contribution to American drama in 1979. His tragic suicide occurred in 2004. Considering all of this, the dearth of serious scholarship on Gray is mystifying. We can certainly find interviews, profiles, performance reviews, book chapters offering brief discussions of his work, and a few articles in scholarly journals, usually focusing on his most famous monologue, Swimming to Cambodia. Only now, however, with William W. Demastes's comprehensive and lucidly written study, do we have a book that takes the measure of Gray's entire career – as actor, monologist, novelist – and argues for the centrality of his work to contemporary American theatre. The key word in the preceding sentence is "American," for, as Demastes's title suggests, when Gray performed his obsessively introspective monologues – never shying away from exhibiting his own human frailties and flaws – he was staging and submitting for our critical scrutiny nothing less than a specific concept of America, "that thing known as self-confident, monolithic, colossal 'America'" (226). For Demastes, Gray's America, embodied in that endlessly fascinating, far-from-perfect, often existentially split dramatic character called "Spalding Gray," was a nation "in need of major self-evaluation, increased self-awareness, and a willingness to adjust itself without necessarily altering what it [was] at its heart" (227). Demastes argues that Gray staged the nation – staged himself "as" the nation – by splitting into three Spaldings, identified as Gray "the observer of events . . . Gray the artist . . . [and] Gray the performer" (63–64). "The observer" detached himself both from the cultural/national phenomena and from the personal actions that "the artist" would shape into a monologue; the monologue offered a critical perspective on these actions and phenomena, a perspective of which "the performer" – "a naïve stage presence who appeared fully incorporated into 'the American system'" (64) – seemed unaware. Swimming to Cambodia, Gray's account of his experiences in Thailand while acting in the film The Killing Fields, provides a perfect example of this split. While discussing the film's ostensible critique of the catastrophic effects of American foreign policy on Third World nations, Gray nevertheless displays his own participation in America's exploitation of "the Orient": he speaks of keeping a Thai prostitute, complains about the inadequacy of his salary without acknowledging the economic inequity suffered by the Thais and Cambodians working on the film, and refuses to engage in a debate with a Cambodian student who accuses the filmmakers of neocolonialist bias. For Demastes, "Gray the artist" shapes the monologue so that, even as "Gray the performer" misses the connection between America and the effects of his own actions – and thus his complicity in America's actions on the geopolitical stage – we, in the audience, can [End Page 493] make the link between Gray's interpersonal encounters with individual Asians and the deleterious effects of American global interventionism. "Gray the artist" constructs a monologue that grants the audience this insight because Gray "the observer" not only scrutinizes America with a critical gaze but always interrogates the privileged subject position from which he writes, the position of "a white, middle-class, heterosexual male of Northern European descent" (7). Demastes's identification of the three Grays yields some compelling analyses (particularly of the monologues that have received little critical attention) but is not unproblematic. The figure "Gray the performer" seems to conflate the (corpo)reality of Gray's performing body as it appears before his audiences with the role that body performs – what we might call "Gray the character." Such a conflation suggests the kind of realistic acting predominant in mainstream American theatre, where the actor disappears into and merges with the role, an acting style that – as Demastes himself points out – Gray decisively rejected early in his career when he...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.