Artists & Projects Directory
Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell
Spalding Gray, writer, actor and performer, created a series of 18 monologues, including Sex and Death to the Age 14; Booze, Cars and College Girls; A Personal History of the American Theater; India and After (America); Monster in a Box; Gray's Anatomy; It's a Slippery Slope; Morning, Noon and Night, and the Obie Award-winning Swimming to Cambodia.
From
1969 through 1985, Gray worked with The Performing Garage in New York,
with The Performance Group directed by Richard Schechner and with The
Wooster Group directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. From 1975 to 1978 Gray
and LeCompte created his autobiographical trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island. His early signature monologues were also developed at the Garage, including Sex and Death to the Age 14; India and After (America); A Personal History of the American Theater; 47 Beds; and Swimming to Cambodia, which was made into a film by Jonathan Demme. Gray performed all of these monologues in the 1990s at Lincoln Center Theater.
As an actor, Gray performed on Broadway playing Secretary William in Gore Vidal's The Best Man and the Stage Manager in the revival of Thorton Wilder's Our Town,
directed by Gregory Mosher. Other theater credits include the role of
Hoss in the Performance Group's New York premiere of Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime.
Gray appeared in more than 40 films, including Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields; Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia; David Byrne's True Stories; Robert Mulligan's Clara's Heart; Gary Marshall's Beaches; Steven Soderbergh's King of the Hill; Ron Howard's The Paper; John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon; and Jeremiah Chechik's Diabolique. Television appearances include a recurring role in The Nanny, and Zelda, directed by Pat O'Connor.
Publications include a collection of monologues, Sex and Death to the Age 14 (Random House); Swimming to Cambodia (Theater Communications Group); Monster in a Box (Vintage); In Search of the Monkey Girl (Aperture Press); Gray's Anatomy (Vintage); the novel Impossible Vacation (Knopf); the novel It's a Slippery Slope (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux); and Morning, Noon and Night (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux).
Several of Gray's other monologues have been released as films, including Gray's Anatomy, directed by Steven Soderbergh (1997); Monster in a Box, directed by Nick Broomfield (1992); and Terrors of Pleasure, directed by Thomas Schlamme (1988).
Gray
took his life in January of 2004 after a two-year battle with
depression caused by a head injury sustained in a car accident in
Ireland. His last monologue, Life Interrupted, was in
development at Performance Space 122 in December of 2003 and was
published in 2005 by Crown Publishing. It was also released as a CD
with Sam Shepard reading the voice of Spalding in 2005. Gray is
survived by his sons Forrest and Theo, his daughter Marissa and his
wife, Kathleen Russo.