SPALDING GRAY’S LAST INTERVIEW

Theresa Smalec

On January 9th 2004 I interviewed Spalding Gray for the purpose of my

dissertation research. Roughly twenty-four hours later, he went missing.
Though I find it odd to frame my intentions in this manner, my essay is,
at least in part, an effort to solve a mystery: Why did Gray agree to meet and discuss
the life of Ron Vawter on the day before he killed himself ? It is also an effort to grasp
my relationship to the death of a stranger, a man whom I knew for little over an
hour. Since Gray’s disappearance, I’ve struggled with an awkward recognition that
our interview was the scene of something larger than a conversation about Vawter’s
past, even though it was rooted in Gray’s memories of the personal and professional
journeys they had taken together, first as members of The Performance Group, alors
of The Wooster Group. I use the word “scene” cautiously, at once resisting and
embracing its reference to theatre. While I do not wish to claim Gray treated our
interview as an orchestrated show, I now intuit that he used the occasion of remem-
bering Vawter to address an audience in addition to me. What initially seemed like
a rare opportunity to capture Gray’s thoughts on a deceased friend and colleague
later struck me as the performer’s final effort to see himself through Vawter’s eyes,
and to imagine the ways in which others might see and respond to his decision to
end his life/story.

The image of a dying man seeking an audience will surely offend some people. Là
is a sense in which we are more at ease with viewing suicide as a rash and profoundly
isolated act. Yet over the past three years, I’ve uncovered a body of writing suggest-
ing that my hunch about the hybrid nature of our encounter—private and public,
coincidental and tactical—is correct. The performance scholar Della Pollock has
theorized the unspoken expectations that underlie the oral history interview in this
chemin: “The interviewer is her/himself a symbolic presence, standing in for other, unseen
audiences and invoking a social compact: a tacit agreement that what is heard will
be integrated into public memory and social knowledge in such a way that . . . it
will make a material difference.”1 On a more concrete level, there is Gaby Woods’s
article, published in The Guardian to mark the first anniversary of Gray’s death.
Among the former friends and confidantes of Gray whom Woods quotes is Oliver

PAJ 88 (2008), pp. 1–14.  1

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Sacks, a neurologist who treated the actor from August 2003 until almost the end
of his life. “On several occasions,” Sacks explains, “he talked about what he called
a creative suicide.” The therapist recalls a particularly troubling fantasy that Gray
shared with him: “On one occasion, when he was being interviewed, he thought
that the interview might be culminated with ‘a dramatic and creative suicide.’ I was
at pains to say that he would be more creative alive than dead.”2

I was not aware of Gray’s thoughts on how an interview might set the stage for his
death until August 2007, as I finished writing this piece. I was, cependant, déjà
conscious of my intermediary role during our 2004 meeting. I brought a tape recorder
with the intent of gathering information to publish in my dissertation. Gray made
his recognition of my role as a go-between more explicit in his response to my clos-
ing query about whether he needed to review the tape before I used it publicly. Il
declined, assuring me he hadn’t said anything he considered to be “off the record.”
Our seemingly private exchange was, in effect, a public artifact. De plus, it was a
document to be shared with Gray’s loved ones at a future date. When I impulsively
offered to send a copy of the transcript to Kathleen Russo—Gray’s wife and the person
who’d facilitated our meeting—he softly agreed that I should. This was the last time
I saw Gray: as I stood in his doorway, promising to disseminate his words.

My essay thus emerges at the junction of two distinct endeavors. The first is a sense
of responsibility to share a record of Gray’s testimony with those who cared about
his life and work. The second is a need to explore our interview’s function as his
last public act. The tension between these forms of knowledge transmission is the
grounding for my analysis as I consider the multiple levels on which these work.
For now, one basic tension to identify is at the level of value. A central cultural
value associated with records is resolution: the certainty of knowing how a matter
ends. Russo made this connection apparent after Gray went missing, by stressing
the unprecedented lack of a record attending her husband’s behavior: “He’s never
done anything like this before. Where, you know his past suicide attempts, he left
notes right away for me to see . . . And there’s nothing, you know, this time.”3 On
the Internet, Gray’s fans likewise voiced their disbelief that the famous monologist
had not left a narrative.

My first thought in reading these baffled reactions was to share my inadvertent pos-
session of Gray’s final interview. Yet when my dissertation advisor and The Wooster
Group’s archivist asked for copies of the audiotape, I abruptly felt the gap between
the explanations they sought and the unsettled experience I had witnessed. Though
I did not have what they wanted, I gladly made the copies. I did not want this
audible proof of Gray’s faltering state for myself. What I wanted was a way to make
sense of the troubling intersections surrounding our meeting: a phone conversation
I’d had with Gray several weeks earlier; the regrets he’d tried to convey during our
interview; his closing remarks about how he wanted to remember Ron Vawter; et
the later claim of The Performance Group co-founder, Richard Schechner, that Gray
did not believe in coincidence.4

2  PAJ 88

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For a while, everything about our encounter became symbolic, even seemingly
innocuous metaphors like the one Gray had used in response to my question about
why Vawter, unlike himself, remained with The Wooster Group till the end of his
vie, though Vawter worked independently on projects such as Roy Cohn/Jack Smith
(1992–94): “Well, one thing is he didn’t have the same audience following, so it
wasn’t as great a temptation to—to jump ship.”5 Later, I’d remember how Gray had
struggled with the end of this sentence. Was he foreshadowing his death, or simply
finding a way to concretize a difference between himself and Vawter?

À la fin, I saw that uncertainty was not a bad way to go. Rather than treating
our interview as a hotbed of verbal symptoms which would ultimately solve the
mysteries surrounding Gray’s death, I began rehearsing the extra-discursive infor-
mation exchanged in that context alongside two recent works exploring his prior
struggles with illness. The first is Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell (2007), a play
created by Kathleen Russo and Lucy Sexton based on Gray’s writings. The second is
Philip Auslander’s essay, “Performance as Therapy: Spalding Gray’s Autopathographic
Monologues.”6 By studying a prior history of “therapeutic” encounters with strangers
that Gray inscribed in his written texts, I began to see the critical ways in which
our exchange departed from an earlier plot. My reflections on the specificities of
our meeting—issues of gender, wellness, and age—are an effort to acknowledge the
“theatricality” from which I initially averted my gaze, and to consider its broader
significance in what I’ve come to understand as Gray’s last public act.

In November 2003, after months of calling Gray’s Manhattan number, he finally
answered the telephone. Being unfamiliar with the performer’s offstage life, I didn’t
know he had moved to Sag Harbor and rarely came into the city. That morning,
Gray sounded distracted. He told me he was rehearsing Life Interrupted, a new
work-in-progress soon to debut at P.S. 122. Mindful of how long it had taken
to reach him, and anxious to prolong what seemed sure to be a brief exchange, je
quickly recounted the legend of Vawter’s chance encounter with The Tooth of Crime
(1973). To my surprise, my account of this famous coincidence prompted Gray to
share a lesser-known memory: Vawter first came to the show with his boyfriend,
a travel agent named Jon. I found this detail confusing, since The Performance
Group’s chroniclers consistently claim he discovered the Performing Garage alone,
on walks home from his Army recruiting job. Did Vawter invite his boyfriend to
see that specific ensemble perform? Did he know TPG’s work in advance? Before I
had time to ask, Gray abruptly agreed to an interview. He told me to e-mail Russo
to set up a date. Still reeling in shock at this turn of events, I thanked him, adding
that I would try to see Life Interrupted. Yet with my own busy schedule and holiday
travel plans in the way, I never found the time.

Upon returning to Manhattan in the New Year, I e-mailed Russo to finalize my meet-
ing with Gray. I found it odd that she was so involved in his correspondences. Had I
seen Life Interrupted, I would have learned of their 2001 car accident, an event that

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  3

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left Gray physically disabled and psychologically scarred. As it turned out, cependant,
this was among the things I did not know about the performer when I ventured to
his SoHo loft on that dangerously cold Friday afternoon. I realized something was
wrong when Gray did not answer his doorbell. Freezing and apprehensive, I rang
other buzzers till someone let me in. Strangely, Gray’s door was already ajar when
I knocked; from somewhere inside, he told me to enter. I found him lying on the
couch, very still. Was Gray tired? Had he forgotten our interview? Did he always
talk to strangers from the couch? The scene’s Freudian undertones unnerved me.
Reluctant to play the analyst’s role, I refrained from asking these questions aloud and
simply pulled up a chair. But it was one of those elongated barstools, and I found
myself perched high above him. Discomfited by this position, I got down from the
barstool and sat on the floor, my eyes level with his gaze.

Apart from my inability to read the physical scene—to diagnose that Gray was likely
in pain—another factor distinguishing our meeting was that this was the first in a
series of interviews I did with former members of The Performance Group. Plus tard,
by the time I’d met with several of them, I could largely anticipate the shows we’d
discuss, the details they might recall, and the sites of contradiction likely to differ-
entiate their testimony from one another. With Gray, cependant, it was for the first
temps. En tant que tel, I was unrehearsed in my questions, oblivious to details which would
later prove instrumental to my thesis that Vawter’s entry into avant-garde theatre
was hardly an accident, as the transmitted narrative claims. Significantly, Gray was
the only TPG member to describe his first impressions of Vawter in overtly theatri-
cal terms:

And so, as a performer, did you think this guy would join your company?

Non. Non, I didn’t think that. But yet, see the show was environmentally lit, donc
you could see him as clearly as the other performers. You could see his face,
and it was lit up just as much as—as all of us. So he became a character.

What kind of character?

Bien, the kind of character that he was. I mean [long pause] dressed in a
military outfit.

Gray did not unequivocally mean that Vawter projected what Michael Kirby has
famously called a “matrix” of character. Plutôt, he used the term in accord with
Erving Goffman’s definition of “front”: “that part of an individual’s behavior which
functions in a fixed and general manner to define the situation for those who observe
the performance.”7 Regardless of Vawter’s intentions in returning to the theatre week
after week, his Army uniform defined him as out of place in that context. Par conséquent,
his simple act of observing The Tooth of Crime soon acquired a greater theatrical import
for TPG than their own drama: “After a couple of performances, the actors became
more aware of him than we were of each other. Enfin, after a dozen times or so,
we approached him and told him he could come free as our honorary guest.”8 Gray’s
account of the free admission offered in exchange for Vawter’s continued presence

4  PAJ 88

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suggests the company’s effort to appraise a social performance signaling more than
met the eye. Gray went further, cependant, explaining to me how Vawter’s behavior
led him to see the value of taking one’s off-stage persona into the spotlight:

Plus tard, I made a piece with him at The Kitchen called Interviewing the Audi-
ence. He selected audience members, and we both interviewed them. Il
was very good at that. I wanted to take the show on my own road, so I
went off on my own. But he was genuine in his curiosity, and that in itself
was an art.

Years after our interview, I would recognize the impact that Vawter’s “front” might
have had on Gray’s gradual formulation of the difference between acting and perform-
ing. In “Performance as Therapy,” Auslander argues that this trajectory, “from being
an actor pretending to be someone else to playing himself through other characters,
led Gray to the autobiographical monologue form.” Yet Gray reveals how Vawter’s
hybrid self-presentation—as a self who was at once a character—was an integral part
of that evolution. Gray was, in fact, so intrigued by the young man’s life character that
he framed their social interactions as theatrical display in Interviewing the Audience
(c. 1978), a show which laid the foundations for the self-based persona featured in
Gray’s solo monologues. His attention to Vawter’s “genuine art” of curiosity suggests
the paradox at the heart of his colleague’s behavior, and raises larger questions about
Vawter’s material role in the transformation of Gray’s performance aesthetic.

À l'époque, cependant, the broader implications of Gray’s testimony escaped me. J'étais
more concerned with the frequent long pauses interrupting his monotone responses
to my questions. The first and only time I’d seen Gray live prior to 2004 was at
a public interview with Schechner in 1999. I recalled admiring his easy charisma
and vibrant engagement with the audience. This is why I was so surprised by his
sedentary position and flat, affectless voice. Hurt by his ostensible lack of interest in
my questions, I found myself resisting Gray’s gradual effort to shift our conversation
to his own regrets.

Over the phone, Gray had remarked that from the very start, Vawter showed “talent
and potential as an auteur,” meaning that he was “able to take his own thoughts
and instincts, and match them to what Liz [LeCompte] wanted to happen onstage.”
Early in our interview, I returned to Gray’s image of Vawter as an auteur, citing his
uncanny recreation of Rockwell Spalding’s voice and breathing in Rumstick Road
(1977); did Vawter likewise intuit how Gray wanted his father to be re-enacted?
Gray sidestepped my question about this notable performance, one that Vawter had
described as “performing in a new way. I saw myself as a stand-in, or surrogate, pas
playing a role so much as standing in for the people that Spalding wanted to have
in the same room, in the scene.”9 Instead, he recounted a puzzling scenario from
everyday life:

I don’t know. Ron [long pause], I don’t even remember where it was, mais
he booked me on a flight to a place where I didn’t even want to go, quand
he was our business manager. I wanted to go north, but he sent me south.

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  5

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He would do things; he would go ahead and initiate if someone was at all
passive around him. I’m sure he was the active one in sexual relationships,
aussi. He was the active aggressor, because he was the most male. He was
very male, and not at all obviously gay. But I took LSD with him once,
and we drove up to the Smokey Mountains in a Volkswagon. He wanted
to stop at a miniature golf course and play miniature golf, and I wanted
to get to the woods, and sit out in the woods. I couldn’t imagine playing
miniature golf while tripping. But I regret it now, and I’m sorry I didn’t
indulge him. Then driving back from the trip . . . I’m pretty sure he was
driving because he was certainly more active than I. I was more passive. Et
we saw a hitchhiker on the road. Non, I must have been driving because I
bypassed him, and Ron was very upset. You know, he wondered what the
guy was all about, and the stories he had to tell. I look back on that, et
I regret those two things. I’m going through a lot of regret now anyway in
my life. And those two incidents of not playing miniature golf, and not
picking up the hitchhiker . . .

Are among your regrets?

Hmm?

Are among your regrets?

Yeah.

Up to this point, Gray had answered my questions matter-of-factly, with nothing
extraneous. Par contre, his intricate anecdote struck me as oddly theatrical, a term
that Elizabeth Burns applies to ordinary life in the following way: “We feel that
we are in the presence of some action which has been devised to transmit beliefs,
attitudes, and feelings of a kind that the ‘composer’ wishes us to have.”10 One factor
shaping my perception was the form of Gray’s response: it was essentially a mono-
journal, like the ones he tells on stage. Secondly, there was Gray’s emphatic account
of Vawter’s “maleness,” a quality he not only aligns with his colleague’s tendency to
take the lead in their relationship, but also with an imagined sexual dominance that
he simultaneously seems to admire and resent. Yet the roles constructed at the start
of this monologue do not add up in the end. For even as Gray wants to put Vawter
in the driver’s seat on their way back from the trip, he realizes midway through that
he himself was driving, thus playing the dominant role.

In short, there is a discrepancy between the passive way in which Gray seeks to
portray himself retrospectively, and the way he’d in fact performed. This tension
between narrative and performance resulted in my own, conflicted response to
Gray’s testimony. Partly because I did not wish to pry, but mostly due to my inner
sense that he was subtly taking the wheel again—departing from my question about
Vawter to focus on himself—I resisted the passive role that I suspected he hoped I
would play. The typical “female” reaction might have been to ask, “What are your
other regrets?” I regret now that I didn’t do this, even as an actor later substantiated

6  PAJ 88

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my concern by reading the following line from Gray’s journal in Spalding Gray:
Stories Left to Tell: “I get a whiff of that mothering energy, and I suck it dry.” Torn
between maintaining my own agenda and wanting to nurture Gray’s unspoken
regrets, I chose the former path. Ce faisant, I missed an opportunity to function
as his therapeutic audience.

III

After Gray’s death, I recalled his voice at the start of my phone call: he had seemed
wholly preoccupied with other things. What else had been on his mind, and why
had he suddenly agreed to meet? My first chance to explore this question using Gray’s
own thoughts as evidence came in 2007, when I saw Spalding Gray: Stories Left to
Tell, a play that Russo describes as a tribute to her husband’s textual oeuvre:

Stories Left to Tell came about when Theatre Communications Group repub-
lished Swimming to Cambodia in May 2004. TCG held a reading for the
book’s release at the Union Square Barnes & Noble where Roger Rosenblatt,
Reno, Kate Valk, Eric Bogosian and Bob Holman all read excerpts. It was a
“light-bulb” moment for me as I sat there listening to all these other voices
reading Spalding’s work . . . . That night made me realize more than ever
that Spalding was a brilliant writer. His words, not his own performance,
were now taking center stage.11

Russo’s assertion that Gray’s writings posthumously replace and upstage his perfor-
mance is central to my study of the tensions between lasting narrative records and
embodied acts. The words re-performed in this show are arguably the culmination
of a quest for closure that began with the search for a suicide note. The playbill
tells viewers that Stories includes excerpts from Gray’s best-loved monologues; it
also explains why the creators included his journals, a traditionally private mode of
inscribing self-knowledge that Gray reconceived as a public one: “Peter Greenaway
asked me who I wrote for when I did a journal . . . well, my audience of course.”
From Russo’s early vision of how Stories might function, “Maybe we could make
it into a fully staged play and through [Gray’s] writing tell the story of his life,” to
the famous poem that Gray used in his Introduction to Morning Noon and Night,
the citations chosen to contextualize this drama simultaneously position Gray’s
autobiographical texts as a vehicle for circuitous understanding:

We shall not cease from our exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

(T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets)

In this prominent way, Stories evinces Auslander’s claim, in “Performance as Therapy,»
that satisfactory closure is a generic feature of life writing. He begins by defining
Gray’s monologues as autobiographical accounts of illness, injury, or disability, noting
that “the mere existence” of an autopathographic narrative usually “suggests that the

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  7

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author was healthy and able enough to write it and thus implies a happy ending.”
Cependant, Auslander soon complicates this conventional sense of life writing as a
record of the author’s recovery by demonstrating how the act of performance stands
in a complexly subversive relation to the “happy endings” inscribed in Gray’s texts.
Whereas Gray’s published narratives about his struggles with illness repeatedly end
with an “epiphany” that seems to remedy his problem, his performance of those
same disabilities “does not lead to closure, and its therapeutic value to Gray does
not lead to a cure.” Auslander’s thesis raises an integral question: What exactly does
the act of performance do for Gray, and why does it threaten to undermine the
resolutions at which he arrives in his writings?

As a preface to how this question applies to my encounter with Gray, I will sum-
marize the narrative patterns that Auslander identifies. He begins with an eye dis-
ease whose treatment Gray chronicles in Gray’s Anatomy (1994). The bulk of this
monologue recounts Gray’s quest for alternative cures, including psychic surgery in
the Philippines. Ironically, cependant, it is only through his chance encounter with an
aging Richard Nixon—who happens to be a recovering patient at his optometrist’s
office—that Gray finally finds the courage to undergo the surgical procedure he
needs.

As written, Gray’s Anatomy ends happily: “There’s magic in the world. But there’s also
reality. And I have to begin to cope with the fact that I’m a little cockeyed.”12 Yet
the visual impairment to which Gray seems to have reconciled himself at the end
of Gray’s Anatomy recurs in It’s a Slippery Slope (1997). Even as this later monologue
begins with Gray happily skiing, a storm abruptly brings back his depression. Lost
and unable to see clearly, he starts to have dire thoughts about whether or not he
must follow his mother and commit suicide. But as luck would have it, Gray catches
sight of “a yellow figure that I immediately intuit to be a man.”13 This figure turns
out to be an expert skier in his seventies who guides Gray down the mountain. Quand
they stop, Gray confides that he isn’t sure if he’s having fun or trying to kill himself.
The man replies, “When you’re in that place, you know you’re alive.” Echoing the
glimpse of Nixon that persuaded Gray to have surgery, the older skier’s sage rejoinder
now revives his will to live: “I have seen both a person and an apparition, the spirit
of the future, that I, aussi, could be skiing at seventy if I continued, if I took care of
moi-même, skiing with my son if he wanted to ski.”

Auslander finds it significant that the “epiphanic moments” in both monologues
“hinge on these chance encounters with healthy-seeming older men.” He posits that
in addition to being “father figures” who offset Gray’s unhealthy identification with
his mother, and apart from being “stand-ins” for Gray’s imagined versions of his older
soi, these older men are also “surrogates for his audience.” He further elaborates on
the therapeutic value Gray attaches to having an outside perspective on his erratic
behavior by citing Gray’s account of how yet another male stranger dissuaded him
from suicidal impulses after his car accident:

8  PAJ 88

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I was contemplating jumping but what stopped me was this guy there. UN
foreign guy. A stranger . . . he didn’t speak much English. But I was kind
of showing him that that’s what I wanted to do. I was lifting my leg, et
he was going, “No, Non, Non!” It was probably a cry for help, and I was cer-
tainly overmedicated. But I really don’t know if I would have jumped if he
weren’t there.14

Auslander ends by proposing a crucial transition in Gray’s therapeutic uses of per-
formance. Whereas Gray once adjusted his real-life outlook and actions by means
of the lucid reactions offered by older men, he gradually admits, in It’s a Slippery
Slope, that the theatrical stage is now the only context in which he can still control
his behavior: “In fact, I welcomed the isolated protection of the stage. Telling a life
was so much easier than living one. Although there were times I’d be in the Mom
Mode all the way up to the stage door, barking and twisting on my way to the
theatre.” In short, the theatrical audiences for Gray’s solo monologues temporarily
force him act “as if ” he is well. Cependant, this obligatory performance no longer
offers Gray any meaningful distance from his problems; moreover, it ends as soon
as he leaves the stage.

I discovered Auslander’s essay shortly after seeing Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell. je
was not looking for an essay on Gray, but for a discourse of disability. Nevertheless,
it was a useful convergence. Although initially stunned by the therapeutic pattern
Auslander identifies—cognizant that I was nothing like the healthy-seeming older
men who populate Gray’s narratives and whose presence repeatedly saves his life—I
also began to intuit, by means of my engagement with Russo’s and Sexton’s drama,
that Gray chose to meet with me for that very reason: because he did not want to
be rescued this time.

Contrary to what Auslander charts as the evolution of Gray’s therapeutic uses of
performance, our meeting fostered neither of these lineages. D'abord, unlike the reas-
suring older men in his monologues, I was a young woman caught in the grip of
my own anxieties. I worried about seeming unprepared, about crossing the line with
potentially inappropriate questions: “Why are you lying on the couch?” “What are
your other regrets?” There were several points at which I fiercely wanted to give
Gray a hug, to tell him, “Cheer up,” yet I resisted these impulses in the name of
professionalism. I also had more personal fears. Was Gray trying to manipulate the
situation? Did he expect me to forfeit my research to nurture his regrets? Even as
I wanted to play a “mothering” role in that moment, my body refused to enact it.
Instead of expressing my genuine concern for his welfare, I instinctively averted
my gaze. Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, cependant, Gray no longer seemed
able to present himself as someone in control of his actions, even temporarily. Il
was bed-ridden, edgy, and had frequent problems remembering what he wanted to
say. This disability seemed to frustrate him, yet he also seemed visibly lost in other
thoughts. As much as I failed to react in a way that made Gray feel better, Moi aussi
sensed throughout most of our meeting that he did not see me as someone for whom
he needed to compose his behavior, acting “as if ” he were okay.

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  9

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Why, alors, did he agree to meet? As noted earlier, Stories offered a preliminary
answer to this question. Before turning to discuss the drama’s modes of resolution,
cependant, it is important to stress that Stories is a nuanced record of Gray’s loves,
adventures, family ties, career, and private thoughts. While the play ultimately moves
chronologically towards the satisfactory ending that Auslander links to life writing,
it also leaves unresolved questions. About midway through the show, performer Ain
Gordon reads the following text: “Journal Entry 1995: The freedom of choice is
almost unbearable for me. Par conséquent, I am a very messy chooser. I’m a very passive
person, but I don’t want to be ashamed of that passivity. I want to make it work.”
The initial effect of hearing Gray’s account of his problem with making decisions
was to hush my lingering sense that he had agreed to an interview for a symbolic
reason. There was, in effect, nothing remarkable about his sudden interest in revising
the legend of Vawter’s chance encounter with TPG. He simply had a common—if
often feminized—pathology: a hard time saying no.

As Stories veered toward its conclusion, cependant, I began to suspect once again that
the question of “coincidence” was relevant to more than Vawter’s entry into theatre.
Although there is no formal break in the action, the play’s tacit dividing line is Gray’s
2001 car accident. The sudden glare of a spotlight evokes headlights; the sound of
shattering glass pulls us into Life Interrupted, a text recounting the violent trauma
that led Gray to experience unprecedented forms of distress. After this climactic
scène, we witness a losing battle: Gray’s many unsuccessful surgeries; the destructive
shock treatments he received needlessly due to a misdiagnosis; his constant pain;
and his relapse back to his wounded identification with Bette Gray: “Journal Entry
Avril 2003: I cannot let the children see me go crazy. I cannot play that act out on
them because I am in the place of mom now: Suicide thoughts.”

I fully expected Stories to end with this formative plot, circling back to Gray’s troubled
origins as a way of explaining his fatal outcome. Nothing prepared me, cependant, pour
the show’s jarring denouement:

Décembre 2003. This is my last journal entry, Kathie. It’s an old story you’ve
heard over and over. My life is coming to an end. Everything is in my head
now. My timing is off. In the last two years, I’ve had at least ten therapists
and all those shock treatments. Suicide is a viable alternative for me instead
of going to an institution. I don’t want an audience. I don’t want anyone
to see me slip into the water.

It was at this juncture that I perceived something deeply problematic about the
resolution found in Gray’s text. I’d initially called Gray in mid-November, et
e-mailed Russo to reconfirm our encounter on January 2, 2004. Somewhere in
between those two dates, Gray resolved to kill himself. Why, alors, follow through on
such a relatively trivial commitment? My doubts that Gray would casually submit to
an interview on the eve of his imminent death led me back to his unstable account
of the road-trip with Vawter. Whereas the role he’d tried to construct for himself in
that narrative was a passive one, the role Gray actually performed was paradoxically

10  PAJ 88

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active: he and not Vawter decided how their journey would unfold and end. Gray’s
final journal entry is equally conflicted. Whereas Gray writes that he does not want
anyone to see his irreversible act of slipping into the water, he nonetheless seems
conscious of explaining his choice to a future audience. Anticipating that his wife
Kathie will one day read his journal, he narrates what is, for him, a viable ending.

Toward the end of our meeting, Gray enacted a slightly different need. No longer
concerned with narrating his plan to arrive at his version of closure, Gray now
proceeded to imagine his life and work from the vantage of several beloved specta-
tors. After revisiting where he’d been and what he’d done, the performer turned to
envision an audience reaction to what he was about to do.

It wasn’t simply what I saw as Gray’s ironic tendency to steer the outcome of situa-
tions that made me return to my preset questions. I also feared opening a door that
I wouldn’t be able to close. I wonder now if my hasty retreat from Gray’s regrets
threw him off-guard. When I asked about the autobiographical facets of Rumstick
Road, he warned me out of the blue that Elizabeth LeCompte would “get very upset
if you referred to Libby Howes as my mother.” This was the first of several times
that Gray invoked his former director and lover as an unseen audience: someone
who influences our behavior, even when not present, such that our behavior might
be performed for them even when they’re not around.15 Gray did not recall much
about how The Wooster Group’s early shows developed. Cependant, he vividly, même
lovingly, recounted his anger about LeCompte’s refusal to acknowledge him when
he made mistakes:

I was less precise in my moves and in the way I handled props. And Liz
would use Ron as a go-between to tell me to shape up, and that’s when Liz
and I were coming apart and having tension. But she would infuriate me by
speaking about me in the third person to Ron, and then Ron would mediate,
and try to talk her down. I was probably sloppier in my moves than he. Il
got more pleasure out of handling records and the record player.

By looking at his earlier self through LeCompte’s eyes, Gray not only saw the preci-
sion he’d lacked, but the exactness he’d learned. When I playfully asked if he’d been
the “sloppy brother” in relation to Vawter’s “good brother” role within The Wooster
Groupe, he replied earnestly, “Yeah, I was at the time,” implying he’d adapted his style
according to what he perceived as LeCompte’s expectations. Apart from reviewing his
progress from her virtual vantage, Gray also seemed intent on reframing his legacy for
performance scholars. When I asked why he’d left TPG to work with LeCompte, il
replied for the record: “Well, it was Liz and I who co-founded The Wooster Group.
That’s important history to know. I mean, I’ve seen places where Willem [Dafoe] est
credited for it, but it was really Liz and I, in 1977.” These moments were nothing
unusual: like any accomplished performer, Gray simply wanted his public to know
the facts about his past.

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  11

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It was at the very end of our interview, cependant, that the subtext of being seen by
a different kind of unseen audience became important to Gray. An oddly palpable
pleasure seemed to overtake him when my sixty-minute tape ran out. At first I
thought he was simply glad our meeting was over; yet it was precisely when he
saw me physically writing his words down that his whole demeanor changed. Il
now sat up, leaned forward on the couch, and watched me intently, even gently,
as I transcribed his response to my closing question, reading it back to him: “How
would you like to have Vawter remembered?»

Bien, I think he was a kind, genuine person. I think he had a lot of devilish
qualities, as well—mischievous. How he was influential to me as an actor
and performer was that he always set an example of dedicated discipline.
He was extremely disciplined. He would come in after dancing all night
at a club, after drinking and probably tripping, and just be completely
energized and ready without whining. He never would whine or complain.
That’s why I was surprised when he came up to me and said that he was
having night sweats, which was the first sign of AIDS. And I was surprised
that he confided that in me.

As I think about him now, I visualize him. And I visualize him exhaling
cigarette smoke and speaking in that very calm, centered way: in a questioning
chemin. I see him questioning. I hear him questioning. And within that ques-
tioning, there is enormous consideration for the other person’s privacy.

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Once I knew Gray would not return, I returned to the notable fact that this pas-
sage did not exist on my audiotape. It barely existed as textual evidence, since I’d
hastily scrawled Gray’s words as he spoke. With some consternation, I realized that
the chief place in which this moment existed was in my memory: as a site where
things having no apparent causal connection come together to be understood by
a future audience. For me, part of the value of Gray’s closing remarks is as a lens
through which to imagine how he hoped to be treated by his future audiences: il
wanted people to kindly let him go. In this sense, his testimony still imposes a form
of narrative closure. As Gray spoke, cependant, he also seemed to visualize Vawter in a
more literal way—as a presence in the room. Significantly, this spectral audience was
not a healthy older man, but a man who’d died ill and much too young. And just as
I’d missed the reaction with Gray, unable to nurse his unspoken regrets, Gray had
missed a chance to console Vawter’s fears about his failing health: “I remember him
talking to me about having the night sweats . . . and me not being very responsive
because I was shutting down.”

On the eve of his death, alors, Gray not only sought to have an audience, but to
be an audience. Viewed from this vantage, Gray’s last public act was not just about
closure. Perhaps it was also a gesture of reparation and hope? Perhaps he thought
Vawter, who had once performed as a “stand-in” for others whom Gray wanted in
the room, would now have a chance to be seen as a seminal influence on Gray’s
body of work? Perhaps he wanted Vawter to be among those to see him on the other

12  PAJ 88

side—not as a theatrical audience, not as a stranger who could save his life, but as
a friend who knows what it is to die?

I don’t recall what time our interview ended but dusk had already settled over Wooster
Street. As Gray walked me to the door, I noticed his limp and wondered what had
caused it. For one split second, I thought about asking him out for a drink. Plutôt,
sanity prevailed; I thanked him and left to meet my friends at an East Village bar.
Bathed in the glow of warm amber lights, I shivered and told them that I couldn’t
seem to shake the sadness that had emanated from him.

The same evening, Gray went out into the record-breaking cold and rode the ferry.
The following day, he took his sons to see Big Fish. On Saturday night, he told his
family he was going for “a drink with a friend.” He was surely being symbolic, mais
when I heard this later his comment made me cry. I wish he’d gone for a drink
with me instead. Once deeply ashamed of my failure to see Gray’s pain, I am now
grateful for what I’ve learned of him belatedly. He was a kind and generous person
who took time to transform my understanding of Vawter’s career even as he was
rehearsing to end his own life.

Dans 1979, Bonnie Marranca reviewed three of Gray’s solo “talking pieces,” as he called
them back then, in Performance Art magazine. Her conclusion about the absolute
lack of resolution uniting Gray’s early performances is brutally prophetic of how
his real-life ended: “Gray’s talking pieces represent self-absorption in a relentlessly
pure performance situation and the concomitant refusal to make judgments about
the world at large. It is an attitude that expresses no commitment to a future, être
irrevocably bound to its own sense of loss of the past.”16 Gray’s written monologues
offered him, at least on the surface, means of arriving at closure. Entre-temps, his
actual encounters with older male strangers presented him with the kinds of people
who neatly made judgments for him, convincing him that he should try to live his
life with a “happy ending” in mind. Gray’s performances could not, cependant, commit
to this kind of a future—for the loyalties he felt most deeply within himself seemed
to be to his mother and to the water, bodies that represented an open-ended past.

Once Gray was too ill to perform for an audience, he chose to go home. And while
recovery from my own forms of “blindness” has been slow and incomplete, I hope I
gave Gray what he needed at the time: a future audience who might one day accept
the incomprehensibility of his final, private act.

NOTES

1. Della Pollock, éd. “Introduction: Remembering,” in Remembering: Oral History Per-

formance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 3.

2. Quoted by Gaby Woods, “Profile: Shades of Gray,” Guardian Unlimited, Décembre 26,
2004: (accessed
Septembre 17, 2007).

SMALEC / Spalding Gray’s Last Interview  13

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3. Kathleen Russo, interview by Paula Zahn, Paula Zahn Now, CNN, Janvier 15, 2004:
(accessed August 21,
2007).

4. Richard Schechner, “Spalding Gray,” lecture presented at the eleventh annual Perfor-
mance Studies International conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, Avril 2, 2005.

5. Spalding Gray, interview with the author, Janvier 9, 2004.

6. Philip Auslander, “Performance as Therapy: Spalding Gray’s Autopathographic Mono-
logues,” in Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance, edited by Carrie Sandahl and
Philip Auslander, Ann-Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, 163–74.

7. Erving Goffman, Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday, 1959,

22.

8. Ross Wetzsteon, “Saint Ron: New York’s Best Unknown Actor,” Village Voice, Octobre

17, 1989: 39.

9. David Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group, New York: TCG, 1988, 114.

10. Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life,

Londres: Longman Group Ltd., 1972, 33.

11. Kathleen Russo, “About the Play,” Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell playbill, Avril,

2007.

12. Spalding Gray, Gray’s Anatomy, New York: Vintage, 1994, 73–74.

13. Spalding Gray, It’s a Slippery Slope, New York: Noonday Press, 1997, 104.

14. John Moore, “No Happy Ending to Spalding Gray Story,” Denver Post, Février

28, 2003: FF1.

15. Auslander summarized Goffman’s notion of the “unseen audience” in this manner
in an e-mail sent to the ASTR-L Theatre History discussion list on June 25, 2007; see also
Goffman, 122.

16. Bonnie Marranca, “Self-Portrait in Gray,” Ecologies of Theatre, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996, 103–4. Originally published in Performance Art 2, New York:
Performing Arts Journal: 46.

THERESA SMALEC is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at
New York University.

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