Missing actor put life's struggles on stage
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Spalding Gray
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Kathie Russo, wife of missing actor Spalding Gray, talks with CNN's Paula Zahn about her husband's mental health problems. (January 15)
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NEW YORK (AP) -- Before he disappeared last week, Spalding Gray had been performing early versions of a new work that had long bedeviled him -- a monologue about a car wreck more than two years ago that left him physically and emotionally scarred.
The subject matter was harrowing even by the standards of a performer who, in 18 monologues since 1979, has touched on such sensitive topics as his mother's suicide, his struggles with writer's block and his search for spirituality.
But for Gray, publicizing his thoughts has never been about just performing. It's how he comes to terms with the events of his life.
"It's a way of framing his experience and coping with a series of loose ends," says his brother, Rockwell Gray, an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis. "The introspection was a big part of the strength that made these things so much more than sit-down comedy, as some people called them. There is a lot of mind to them."
His family last saw him January 9, when he walked away from his SoHo apartment without his wallet after having seen the movie "Big Fish" with his wife, Kathleen Russo, and one of his sons. There have been subsequent reports that he was seen on the Staten Island ferry later that night, and Russo has said she fears he may have tried to jump off the boat.
Gray officially becomes a missing person Monday.
Dealing with his thoughts on stage "pretty much comes naturally to him," Russo says. "This is a man who never had stage fright. It's the perfect suit for him."
"Swimming to Cambodia," the piece for which he may be best known, begins as a memoir of his appearance in the film "The Killing Fields" but veers into digressions on love, Cambodian politics and nuclear warfare. Other works include "Monster in a Box," which riffs on his failed attempts to finish a novel, and "Gray's Anatomy," a humorous recounting of his quest to cure an eye condition. All three monologues were made into films.
In each monologue, Gray cuts an instantly recognizable figure: a slight, wire-haired man seated behind a desk, equipped with only a microphone, a glass of water and a spiral notebook. His only movement is his expansive gestures and darting eyes. Yet the defining feature of his work is its intensely autobiographical nature. Real figures in his life -- wives, children, work associates -- appear often, in sometimes less-than-flattering portrayals.
"He was a pioneer in saying that the border between the private and public is a very blurry boundary," says Richard Schechner, founder of The Performance Group, a downtown Manhattan theater troupe Gray joined in 1970. Schechner directed the actor in off-Broadway productions of "Mother Courage" and Jean Genet's "The Balcony," among others.
But while Gray has acknowledged insecurities in his monologues, he never conveyed the depths of his periodic depressions, Schechner says.
"His theatrical persona was of someone who always saw the humor and irony in life, but as an actual person, he battled depression and fears," he says.
A particularly low period came after Gray's auto accident in Ireland in 2001, when a van plowed into a car he, his wife and three others were in during a vacation to celebrate his 60th birthday. He suffered a fractured skull, a broken hip and nerve damage, injuries from which he has yet to recover fully.
An avid skier and hiker, Gray became despondent about his physical limitations.
"I have lost my sense of humor since the accident," he told The Salt Lake Tribune in March 2003. "I get up to walk, and I limp and I remember the accident."
He tried suicide several times, including an attempt in late 2002 to jump off a bridge near his second home at the east end of Long Island. A passer-by talked him down.
Even his family, which had been the subject of an affectionate recent monologue called "Morning, Noon and Night," no longer provided solace, he told several interviewers. He has a stepdaughter and two sons with Russo, whom he married 10 years ago.
"I used to criticize him all the time: Just don't reflect on things too much, don't overanalyze, just go on," Russo says.
Gray had been giving readings of his piece about the car accident -- "Life Interrupted" -- as recently as two weeks ago. He had struggled for years to shape his thoughts on the incident, Russo says.
"He could talk about the car accident but he didn't know where to go after that. Until he has distance it's tough for him to write about something," she says.
An agony-filled week after his disappearance, his friends and family are left ruminating over the same unanswerable questions: How could he leave the family that had once given him so much joy? Was the master of introspection too inwardly focused for his own good?
Yet the family remains hopeful.
"As far as I'm concerned, the story is still open," Rockwell Gray says. "My hope is still that he will be able to continue and come back."
"I'm not prepared to speak of him in the past yet," says Schechner. "He could still very well turn up -- he's lived in many ways a wondrous life."
Copyright 2004 The
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