An over-inflated order for a couple of hours on the stage, to be sure—especially hours spent with someone so entertaining and downright hilarious as Gray. But the two parts of Swimming to Cambodia are such rich, deep reflections on the world as we are obliged to live in it right now, and so clearly culminations of work their author has been creating for several years, that they invite hyperbole.
Gray’s life as a performer is an important part of the history of American avant-garde theatre over the past generation. He was active in the 1960s and 1970s with Richard Schechner and the Performance Group, continuing with that theatre after Schechner’s departure and its transformation into the present Wooster Group, one of the most exciting, innovative experimental ensembles operating anywhere today. It was from parts of Gray’s personal history, particularly the events surrounding the suicide of his mother, that director Elizabeth LeCompte fashioned the Rhode Island Trilogy, the Wooster Group’s first work and its first typically controversial artistic success.
Adjacent to those complex, ensemble performances of his past, Gray developed his own monologues which have inevitably become ongoing explorations of his present. First, there was Sex and Death to the Age 14 (childhood to puberty), then Booze, Cars and College Girls (young manhood), A Personal History of the American Theatre (his early career as an actor), India and After (the times and, to a degree, the life of the Performance Group), right up to Interviewing the Audience (which is just that).
When he first sat down behind a modest wooden table, took an almost calibrated sip from a glass of water and began to read from his journals about memories of early erections and the death of pets, Gray surely did not realize that his experiment would become the focal point of a vast range of performance art which would dominate New York’s Soho and other bastions of the artistic vanguard during the 1970s. He became a major influence in that work, praised as an original by some, damned as a perpetrator of the “me-decade” by others. (After all! A guy sitting at a table just talking about himself!)
It would be incorrect to think that these early monologues, eight in all, could be written down and served up end-to-end to total a neat autobiography. All are impressionistic; all weave back and forth in time and place to form tapestries of intertwining themes and imagery which only occasionally reveal a strand of sequential narrative. Some are experimental in the extreme: In India and After, for example (the first monologue that was not strictly “mono”), a partner chooses words from an unabridged dictionary to which Gray responds with free associations having to do with his trips to India and across the United States during the early 1970s.
Likewise, it would be false to consider these pieces to be the narcissistic exercises of an actor’s overgrown ego, unconcerned with such irrelevant externals as politics, history and society. Sex and Death begins and ends with two cataclysmic punctuations: the A-bomb dropped at Hiroshima, the H-bomb at Enewetak. What Gray conveys in between, albeit in the subtlest and most indirect way, is the coming of age in this country after World War II. All of the monologues have had such an added, often hidden, dimension. If you stare at any one of them long enough, you find that what has happened to Gray reflects in a startlingly illuminating way what has happened to the world, or at least a significant section of it, you and I certainly included.
But such allegorical relationships are never explicit, or even apparently deliberate. Each new work is a new development of the Gray persona, which could be characterized as an incorrigible witness, mirror or, well, sponge. And as the material moves through his childhood past into his adult here-and-now, the autobiographical “I” more and more shares the stage with the bystander “he.” It has gradually become Gray’s chosen lot simultaneously to live his life and to play the role of Spalding Gray living his life, and to observe said Gray living his life in order to report on it in the next monologue. Perhaps this hall of mirrors, this endless playoff between performance and reality, has always been the situation of the artist. It is certainly the quintessential perspective of the actor, though seldom dramatized so blatantly. But has it ever been more plainly the predicament of everyone else in this media-ridden age of instant replay? Conditioned by McLuhan and Warhol, Johnny Carson and Phil Donahue, we are all to an extent the subject of our own self-writing life story, our shoot-as-you-go movie. The possibility of celebrity for everyone seems to grow with each news-cast.
So Spalding Gray got a minor role in The Killing Fields, a movie about the recent—one could say continuing—history of Cambodia. It was shot in Thailand, next door to where it originally happened (continues to happen), and in Hollywood, where everything pretends (or aspires) to happen. And he made a monologue about Cambodia, Thailand, Hollywood—and Spalding Gray.
As remarkable as they all are, the previous monologues now seem like test flights for the virtuosic swoops and dives of the Cambodia pieces. In them, those poles by which what we call reality are measured tumble over one another like dice in a crap shoot: fiction over history, madness over sanity, microcosm over macrocosm, dream over reality. A sailor likes blue-flake cocaine, kinky threesomes and the nuclear detonator to which he is handcuffed; a President watches George C. Scott in Patton and tells a gathering of war protesters how travel improves the mind; a corporate vice president reads An Actor Prepares. A small country of exquisite people—an innocent paradise—transforms itself into hell-on-earth, stirred to genocidal frenzy by Mao, Rousseau and B-52s. But, are those slaughtered peasants or day-players cosmetized with stage blood and chicken giblets? Are those burning villages or burning tires set out by the special-effects crew? Is this history or just another take? Through this landscape in which everything threatens to become something else, Gray wanders, the essential white-bread WASP, skirting the shore to avoid the sharks, looking for an agent, afraid he will miss the fun, staying too long at the party, asking simple questions, getting terrifying answers, searching for the Perfect Moment.
This is a recording. For the first time, Gray’s odyssey has been taken down. What in his monologues has always seemed to be writing, hovering just above the little table from which he performs, is now written. We lose the wry, desultory, curious living presence of a master storyteller. But we gain the opportunity to make our own replays again and again, and to take the measure of an achievement that seems to grow with each encounter—perhaps even to epic proportions.
Swimming to Cambodia is copyright © 1985 by Spalding Gray
Swimming to Cambodia is published by
Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue,
24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156.
“About the Author” is copyright © 2005 by Roger Rosenblatt
The Afterword is copyright © 1985 by James Leverett
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Acknowledgments
Poem extract on page 71 from “Of Mere Being,” in The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; used by permission of the publisher. Quotations on page 125 from The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1950, 1978 by Esme Valerie Eliot; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (U.S.) and Faber and Faber (Great Britain); used by permission of the publishers. Lines on page 44 from “Killing Me Softly with His Song” used by permission of Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, copyright © 1972 by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel. All rights reserved.
This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
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Library of Congress C
ataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Spalding, 1941-2004
Swimming to Cambodia.
1. Gray, Spalding, 1941-2004—Journeys—Cambodia. 2. Cambodia—
Description and travel—1975- 3. Moving-picture actors and
actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Killing fields.
eISBN : 978-1-559-36637-3
I. Title.
PN2287 .G6759A.43’028’0924 [B] 85-20875
New Edition, February 2005
Swimming to Cambodia Page 12
