THEATRE PREVIEW:

“GRAY'S ANATOMY” at the La Jolla Playhouse

Published in San Diego Union-Tribune September, 1994

Spalding Gray has always been an enigma. His fabulous, fabulist monologues, though intensely personal and confessional, raise more questions about the writer than they answer.

Is he the cynical, nonbelieving New Yorker he claims to be, or the ingenuous New England Puritan Christian Scientist he was raised as? Is he a Twain-like urban ironist or a neurotic, self-indulgent, navel-watching hypochondriac? Biggest question of all: Is he actually going to stop writing and performing monologues and become a ski instructor for children, or will he soon be on the road again, telling new stories about his deep-powder spiritual awakening?

In a recent phone conversation from a retreat on Martha's Vineyard, Gray was more than usually pensive, less than usually garrulous. He was distracted by a two year-old son, a bubbling seafood chowder and a "wicked head cold." He seemed ambivalent about his imminent trip to La Jolla, to perform his fourteenth monologue, "Gray's Anatomy" (Wednesday through Sunday).

"This may be the last time La Jolla sees me," he said solemnly (he was here in 1985 and 1991). "I'm tired. Ready to retire. I've been touring for ten years."

But soon, he's discussing a one-year tour of his next show (in which he'll interview himself). Who should we believe? The Spalding who says "I love being onstage; whenever I stop performing I get sick" or the one who confesses that "the stage to me was a place to hide out. What is the stage compared to life?"

Gray seems to be in a quandary, at a crossroads. Or maybe it was just the head-cold. In one breath, he's pulling back from "the celebrity rank, being chewed up by people"; in the next, he's promoting his upcoming film (John Boorman's "Beyond Rangoon," about the under-publicized 1988 genocide in Burma) and the novel he'll write next summer (working title: "Too Many Titles to Choose From").

He's worried that not touring will alter his lifestyle. Writing and performing have been lucrative. He won an Obie Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller grant; published six books of monologues and one novel ("Impossible Vacation"); appeared in plays on and off-Broadway and in more than a dozen films. Now he plans to do movies and ski. He's scouting locales. But he still won't give up his SoHo loft in New York. He's been there since 1972, five years before he helped form the Wooster Group, the experimental theater ensemble which is still based at the Performing Garage just across the street.

New York may cause him "despair," but "Gray's Anatomy" is energizing. To him, the 95-minute piece is "a classic; better than any other monologue I've written... better than 'Swimming to Cambodia' and 'Monster in a Box'" (both performed in La Jolla and preserved on film).

"This is really accessible," he says. "It's about coming to terms with immortality. Everyone can relate to it."

"Gray's Anatomy," which premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 1993, then played Lincoln Center, is another one of Gray's obsessional odysseys. This time, the eyes have it.

At age 50 (three years ago), Gray was diagnosed with a rare ophthalmologic affliction, 'macula pucker,' a liquification of the eye's jelly, a (metaphorical?) breakdown of the vitreous humor. He loses the ability to see detail, which is the very essence of his work. He enters "the Bermuda Triangle of health," searching for any alternative to the dreaded retinal-scraping surgery.

In a hilarious series of signature digressions, he takes us to a Christian Science prayer-healer, a Native American sorcerer, into a pseudo-Indian Minneapolis/Scandinavian sweatlodge, to a radical nutritionist and finally a Filipino doctor known as "the Elvis Presley of psychic surgeons."

Post Script (not clearly noted in the monologue): The last-resort traditional surgery left one eye blind.

"It gives me good focus," he says gamely. "I have one eye to look out of and one to look in." Looking in is Gray's fixation. His monologues have exposed his drinking problem, reading disability, AIDS paranoia, sweaty feet, hyperactive conscience, middle-child syndrome, Oedipal complex, and fear of everything, including fear. Still, he has incredible adventures, all of which ("with creative embellishments") he swears are true.

Marriage was one less-than-successful adventure. Although he no longer lives with long-time mate RenŽe Shafransky, and his young son is not hers, she continues to direct his monologues.

Gray has never been comfortable with the moniker 'monologuist,' preferring 'actor-writer-performer'. "The best definition of what I do came from a 10 year-old girl who said 'My dad told me to come and hear the talking man.'" He's compelled to tell stories "to rein in the chaos."

DATEBOOK

"GRAY'S ANATOMY"

Part of the La Jolla Playhouse FLASH Performances, the Spalding Gray monologue previews September 7 (7:30 p.m.), a benefit performance honoring volunteers of the Playhouse and the Museum of Contemporary Art-San Diego (tickets are $25, $50, $60) and continues through September 11. Thursday-Saturday 8 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m. Five performances only. Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UCSD campus. $14-28; 550-1010.

PAT LAUNER is a freelance writer and theater critic for KPBS-FM.

©1994 Patté Productions Inc.