FAREWELL SPALDING GRAY

"I think of America as a pagan country, and the gods and goddesses are the Hollywood stars."

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

He worked in underground theater in Manhattan, eventually co-founding the Wooster Group in 1979. There, he wrote an autobiographical trilogy of plays about life in Rhode Island.

His first monologue was "Sex and Death to the Age 14," mingling events like the bombing of Hiroshima with the death of childhood pets. Gray was hailed as a new brand of performance artist, working alone on a minimalist set.

In 1983, Gray won the role of an American ambassador's aide in The Killing Fields, the story of the bond between a New York Times reporter and a Cambodian photographer.

The resulting monologue, "Swimming to Cambodia," was widely hailed, with Washington Post reviewer David Richards observing, "Talking about himself -- with candor, humor, imagination and the unfailingly bizarre image -- he ends up talking about all of us."

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Here is a mid 1990s interview with Spalding Gray.

Here is a picture of Gray.

I think I'm particularly thankful to Gray for essentially inventing a form of theater that has great possibilities for my own work as an artist: his style of performance art offers me the chance to eventually combine all my artistic, political, and cultural interests into one big bag--someday I hope to create a one man show, based on my years as a teacher, that kind of ties together all my artistic selves while, at the same time, gets across many of the ideas that I've been writing about here at Real Art for the past year or so. I probably wouldn't have thought of this if it weren't for my seeing "Swimming to Cambodia" some years ago.

I also think that Jello Biafra wouldn't have been so successful with his spoken word work without Gray blazing a trail beforehand.

His apparent suicide is one big drag.

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