The Journals of Spalding Gray

by Spalding Gray; Nell Casey

  I discovered how much my camera was removing me from experience.

  (film is a beautiful but expensive sch sceth sketch of ones life)

  It’s now ten o’clock and I’ve been up on this grass since two-thirty this afternoon and I can’t stand all the thinking.

  (I’m in a bad state tonight) I don’t want to live a life through others, but rather, with them but I hardly feel with anyone…. way outside and not even getting along that well with LIZ but why should that MEAN so much? is she (or she and I) some sort of last stand in a world I hardly feel a part of. Just the two of us left…. looking out on all the strangeness.

  dive in, the water’s fine?

  APRIL 2, 1969

  In the end, I feel that nothing matters so why? … why art?

  why anything?

  APRIL 10, 1969

  just realizing that my damned unemployment runs until october! If only I could cut myself loose from money…. the old fuckin’ “money” that binds me like a big shit.

  a joy for some but me I’m more anti-money and more pro-needs.

  If only I could be SUBSIDIZED!

  APRIL 12, 1969

  (3:30 AM) After seeing the play at La mama, I want to get into every thing. I’m not content with just seeing (to be known by everyone…. to be known by everyone)

  The big question is: do I want to be in a play more than I want to be in life? Or, do they (of course) become interchangeable a LIFE PLAY a playlife

  lifeplay

  in most cases, yes…. I admit it. I often get more joy and excitement out of the staged condensation, the poetic condensation of the playlife … of the play…. more joy out of the play than out of life.

  It looks as though I have to stay in the city and exhaust all outlets.

  APRIL 16, 1969

  OPEN THEATRE WORKSHOP

  [The Open Theater workshop was free and run by the actress, writer, and director Joyce Aaron and the playwright and actor Joseph Chaikin. “One day (Aaron) asked us to do an exercise where we stood up and told a personal history as fast as we could,” Gray wrote in his preface to his 1986 book, Sex and Death to the Age 14, a collection of his early monologues. “If we blanked out or ran out of personal memories we were to jam, like a jazz musician, on a particular word or phrase until a new passage came. To my surprise, when it was my turn I experienced a memory film, a series of rather mundane events that had occurred during the previous week. I had no trouble editing or selecting which material to use as I spoke. The images came into my mind in vivid frames and I was able to describe it all in perfect detail. When I sat down, Joyce said, ‘Very interesting. Who wrote that monologue for you?’ ”]

  this judging in the mirror exercise has me worried. I really find my self into judging others and I hate this trait in myself. I don’t think I can think of a worse (TRAIT) trate in me at the moment goddamnitshitfucken

  I think I have a need to judge because of an inferiority complex so that I must say: “ha once again, I’m in the right and she’s wrong.” It’s something worth giving a lot of thought to

  I think it was [Ingmar] Bergman who said something about man freeing himself by getting past the (CHRISTIAN IDEA) of a man being perfect….. man’s hope of perfection but I don’t think I’m battling so much with a perfection hang-up as I am with a basic…. a still basic evil—or evils—I’ve felt in myself all my life, basic usings of people and most of all judgings.

  MAY 25, 1969

  I still have little anxieties about the evil one in me and I know that the little anxieties will not get close to great fears until I get closer to a recognition and confrontation with more of me. As Liz said in my feeble plea that I was a driven man/she just calmly and honestly said, “You’re not driven.” I love her for her honesty and it seems to make me stronger because I’m not allowed the sweet, soft and foolish illusions of my past.

  Accept yourself and move toward what you want to do. There is nothing else in the world but this. To be hung up on money, other people, better or lesser realities etc. is only blocking your freedom (once again I’m giving myself a lecture)…. MY freedom, only blocking my freedom.

  For me, freedom would be the overcoming of anxiety … and the stopping of thinking myself out of reality action. I’m becoming more and more shocked with how dishonest I’ve been with myself!

  MAY 26, 1969

  an interesting dream last night—after being told by my … (I thought mother) not to spoil my appetite fo before eating dinner by eating some white fish—I took her by the arm and threw her across the room and then returned to looking at ads of my mothers relatives…. magazine ads. Upon waking, I realized that it was the “MOTHER” in me which I was rejecting and tossing away. I felt good.

  JUNE 27, 1969

  It’s all a matter of learning to give up these little parts of myself (giving up my virginity was a big part and I suffered like a little school girl) and much of my fear of acid comes out of the intense fear that I will see things in myself, and my still not so open relationship with Liz, that I’ll not be able to face. And this is of course one of the reasons (perhaps) that I don’t want to go home with her…. her parents may see worst of all worse than their lack of approval…. that we are not really arm and arm, lip and lip, cock and cunt in love (goddamit this is hard for me to write and it’s throwing me into a real bad state of mind!)

  ME and the nature of LOVE

  I feel very stupid and cheap

  not at all giving

  I’ve held back on everything except perhaps the stage.

  SEPTEMBER 1969

  Labor day weekend 1969

  I guess what bothers me most…. makes me drink before bed and wake at four or five in the morning is my lack of humanity.

  Where are my loving friends? Where is love? Where are LOVE and joy? Why brood so much about things? I’m slipping back into those brooding days of Boston [at Emerson College] and yet this next to last day in August sits so heavy on me. Outside there’s hardly a breath of air and Rod is singing folk songs in the room above me. I’m more estranged from my father than I’ve ever been. Liz is still some comfort but foolish and sad America keeps coming to mind and what can only be an outgrowth … a foolish and sad theatre.

  DECEMBER 27, 1969

  Sat.

  just back from the Christmas stay in R.I. and wanted to record a dream I had night of the 24th

  Ellen [LeCompte’s younger sister] comes to an apartment I live in. She knocks hard on the door and I, at last, let her in. She comes in and she’s on top of me. I am slightly aroused but not fully because of guilt I feel about Liz. Ellen gets up and begins to primp with her clothing. She is standing over my head so that I am viewing her from a strange angle.

  She tells me that Liz…. came upon a dead body. Liz was counting urinals so that her head moved exactly from one to another (like a machine go stop focus etc.) and there was this corpse. As Ellen tells the story, I begin to see it….. I am there. We are in a thick deep, dark, grove and there is Ellen Liz and someone like Ken. We see this dead woman. Her flesh is white, full and beautiful. She is almost naked. She had most likely been raped and beaten because she was mostly naked with a dress covering the middle area (breast to thighs) but I only assumed that she had come to a violent death there was no outstanding proof of it although I kept thinking that I saw bruses black and blue marks on her face. She was like a full beautiful Scandinavian woman. And the Ken-type person was asking the corpse questions and moving her head with his hands making an animated response with the body. Then he lifted her up and put her in a wheelbarrow. The body was sort of out of shape, legs and limbs in strange lifeless postures (not they THE way we are used to seeing a dead body placed).

  And the next thing I knew was that Liz and I were out of the thicket and on the flashing bright streets of some open clean city, perhaps in Canada, and the wind flew flags, clouds, the sky, smiling people passed and Liz smiled up at me and I knew all I had to do was to smile back at her.

  the sevent
ies

  I SUDDENLY FELT as though my life has been lived like a man from the press. I’m always telling a story to myself or someone else. I’m telling a story about my life.

  MAY 29, 1973

  Although Gray once felt great anxiety about the prospect of living in New York City, he was able to make it his home, literally and figuratively, during this decade. He and LeCompte bought a loft, a former machine shop on Wooster Street in the SoHo neighborhood of lower Manhattan, down the block from the Performing Garage, in 1974. “It was the cobblestones that first attracted me to Wooster Street,” Gray wrote in a 1997 statement for the SoHo Community Council. “In those days, the streets of SoHo were empty at night. Our audience, many of them, would actually call the Garage before coming, to ask if it was safe to walk on the deserted streets. We, that lived there, loved those streets. For many of us, that was why we were there—for the beautiful old buildings and for the emptiness.”

  A community of artists formed in the neighborhood in the sixties and seventies, drawn by the raw, inexpensive spaces fashioned out of the upper floors of old factories. “We all knew each other, and so we all attended each other’s events,” Eric Bogosian, a performer and writer who rose to fame in the eighties, said. “People would have all kinds of impromptu performances in their own lofts all the time. Nobody cared about being a star. It was a hippie thing … Very extravagant things were going on in the art world down here. On Saturday afternoons, people would walk around and go to whatever art shows—Don Judd, Sol LeWitt, Cy Twombly. They were all friends. Or they’d go to performances at the Kitchen [theater] and there was zero interest, none, with uptown. All the cultural institutions uptown were seen as ancient dinosaurs. Whether it was the ballet or the opera—everything was old and stuffy, and we were new and exciting.”

  Gray came to know other emerging artists—Joan Jonas, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass, among them—while Schechner’s reinvented Performance Group garnered attention and respect as an inventive theatrical enterprise. As Gray became better known in the downtown theater world, he grew steadily more confident in himself as a performer.

  Throughout these years, he honed his sense of self in his work. In the spring of 1970, the Performance Group began rehearsing a piece called Commune. Created by Schechner and the members of the group, the show was based on “a whole hodgepodge of collected things,” as Gray explained it in A Personal History of American Theater. “The setting was that we were a commune, also we were a theater group, and we were reenacting certain Americana Communal scenes culminating in the killing of Sharon Tate, supposedly by the Manson gang, which was a bit risky because it hadn’t been proven that he was actually guilty.” In Commune, Gray played the role of Spalding, based on how Schechner perceived Gray, an observer who would comment on the action. “That was my first move toward autobiography,” Gray once remarked in an interview onstage at New York University with Schechner, “but I didn’t realize it at the time.”

  In 1972, Schechner gave Gray the lead role in a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime, a musical play about an aging rock star named Hoss who is desperate to maintain his fame in a changing world—in the end, however, he takes his own life. (LeCompte, who had first joined the group as an assistant to Schechner on Commune, also played a small role in The Tooth of Crime.) Playing Hoss, with his head shaved and wearing a green cape and glittery jockstrap, Gray confronted the audience once again as himself. “[In the play] I do a very long soliloquy … Richard said, ‘I want you at the end of this … to drop your character. Drop all this character you’ve built up of Hoss, and just stand there’ … surrounded by the audience,” Gray explained. “I remember … feeling this onion of the character peeling away, peel after peel, and then standing there, looking at the audiences’ faces. I looked at them from myself—whatever that was—which really felt quite empty…. And that was a really important space for me to go into every night, I really looked forward to that. It was a very powerful, beautiful meditation. It began to occur to me, what if I didn’t rebuild my character? If I continued to stand here, looking at the audience. What might I say?”

  By mid-decade, Gray and LeCompte had started collaborating—he as performer and she as director—on theater pieces, still as members of the Performance Group but without Schechner’s involvement. This, however, was not an official break: Schechner, who encouraged others to direct within the group, knew that LeCompte and Gray were working on their own material. Over the course of three years, Gray and LeCompte created a series of plays: Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School. Together, these pieces were called Three Places in Rhode Island or, less formally, the Rhode Island Trilogy. Each play in some way reflected a piece of Gray’s life. And each one brought him closer to offering his own story to an audience.

  Sakonnet Point debuted in 1975. Gray described it as “a silent mood piece which represented the child before speech.” Performers, including Gray, danced throughout the production while various recorded sounds including the trill of birds, children’s songs such as “This Old Man (Knick-Knack Paddy Whack),” and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1—chosen by LeCompte and Gray—played in the background. Gray gave the other performers a very clear idea of what he wanted physically in the piece, which they improvised on. LeCompte then selected the movements that would remain in the show.

  Rumstick Road, which opened two years later, in 1977, was an experimental exploration of Gray’s family history and his mother’s suicide. Many of the performers in the Wooster Group portrayed members of Gray’s family. Ron Vawter played Gray’s father and Gram Gray, among other roles; in one scene, Libby Howes played Gray’s mother with a slide image of Elizabeth Horton projected across her face. It was a startlingly effective technique: Howes’s face was completely transformed. The piece also used movement to evoke emotion—including Gray giddily chasing Howes across the stage and, later, Howes, again inhabiting Gray’s mother, whipping her body back and forth repeatedly, from bent to standing, with her hair flying, a terrifying portrayal of madness. Then Gray, momentarily playing the narrator, stepped forward for the first time and addressed the audience. Excerpts from his interviews with his (reluctant) father, his two grandmothers, and his mother’s psychiatrist about his mother’s breakdown, electroshock treatments, and suicide streamed out from audiotapes across the theater during the show. “Of course, it’s just a real mystery to me how she could’ve done it. We have no conception of what the mind can do,” the frail voice of Gram Gray played from the speaker. “And how it could have turned that light-hearted, full of pep woman into what she turned out to be was just unbelievable.”

  “I’d like to register a vehement protest about the morality of using private documents and tapes in this kind of public performance,” Michael Feingold wrote in a review in The Village Voice. “Gray obviously thinks he’s found a terrific way to rivet an audience’s attention … I feel cheapened by having been made to participate in the violation of a stranger’s privacy … to make a point of including dishonorable transactions like this in it is to brutalize the audience, implicating them in the artist’s pain instead of offering them a share in its transcendence.”

  Gray responded to Feingold in the following week’s Voice: “At the time we made Rumstick, we saw theatre as a place to make the personal public. O’Neill quoted his family in Long Day’s Journey into Night,” he wrote. “We live in a brutal time that demands immediate expression. By using private words and documents, Rumstick employs the painful and ‘exploitative’ mode common to modern autobiography.”

  With the debut of Nayatt School in 1978, “the monologue form I’d been developing found its full expression,” Gray wrote in the introduction to his book Sex and Death. “Much of Nayatt School was based on a deconstruction of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, and at the beginning of the piece I performed a short monologue about my relationship to that play while sitting at a long wooden table.” This piece also included a re-creation of an Arch Oboler
recording and an interpretation of The Cocktail Party, with ten- and eleven-year-old children playing adult roles alongside Wooster Group actors.

  “A great deal is attempted [in Rumstick Road]: to make memory live not only for the rememberer, Mr. Gray, but also for the audience. Feelings about one particular past are not merely described and portrayed but—or at least this is the attempt—also transmitted. Lazarus is not simply being recollected; he is being revived and made to walk among us,” Richard Eder wrote in a joint review of Rumstick Road and Nayatt School in The New York Times in 1978. “[Nayatt School] is a brilliant and engrossing work; one whose abstraction and complexity are at the service of genuine emotion, and whose artistry in execution is such that even its conceptual misfirings are splendidly theatrical.”

  The critical recognition of the Rhode Island Trilogy and the ease with which Gray fashioned his private self as a public persona delivered him to the art form he’d been searching for all along.

  On April 20, 1979, Gray debuted his first solo show, Sex and Death to the Age 14, at the Performing Garage. The show ran for a month and a half. He took the idea of using a wooden table from Nayatt School but shrank it down to the size of a desk. “I sat behind that desk,” Gray wrote in the book version of Sex and Death to the Age 14, “with a little notebook containing an outline of all I could remember about sex and death up until I was 14 years old.” He improvised the story for his audience, tape-recording each show, and adjusted his outline afterward. The story gradually grew from forty minutes to an hour and twenty minutes. “I was surprised that he was able to put it in this shape and it was such a success,” Schechner said of seeing an early performance of the show. “I was surprised at how simple it was. I’d spent my whole life in theater, and I’d seen a lot of tricks—and this had very few tricks.”