Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

In September 1978, two nights after I arrive in New York City to attend graduate school, I find myself in the front row at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street watching Nayatt School. The play is the third part of the Wooster Group's trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island, based on autobiographical incidents in the life of Spalding Gray, who, spiffed up in a white lab coat and tie, is in the cast. The performers are seated precariously along an eight-foot-high ledge facing the risers on which the audience is situated—which places me face-to-face, at a distance that can't be more than four or five feet, with a remarkable actor whose name, I learn later, is Ron Vawter. On a turntable phonograph, Vawter cues up an interlude of mournful classical music—is it Mahler? Richard Strauss?—and dabs his eyes (they are an extraordinary shade of green) with drops of liquid from a small bottle. Tears well up and stream down his cheeks as the music swells. It is impossible, drenched in the despondency of the music and confronted so intimately with its proximate visual correlative, not to feel a piercing rush of sorrow.

A moment later, when Vawter matter-of-factly lifts the phonograph needle and stops the music, that flood of emotion is abruptly short-circuited, undercut with such force that its dissipation leaves a vivid ache in the chest. Theatre can do this, Vawter is demonstrating—it can stir powerful emotions with the most elemental means (a Mahler LP, a touch of glycerin), and casually stifle those same emotions with impunity. The key is: To what end? In that moment, all I have learned about Brecht, his theories of Gestus and dialectical theatre, begins falling into place in a new way; the necessity for a self-analytical, self-critical theatre becomes tangible, obvious; the limits of what performance can accomplish, the very boundaries of its aspirations, begin to dissolve.

And along with these epiphanies, I have entered into the personal mythology of Spalding Gray. Sakonnet Point, the first piece in the Rhode Island trilogy, had been formed out of improvisations based on Gray's childhood; the central event in the next installment, Rumstick Road, is the suicide of Gray's mother, rendered, controversially, in family photographs, taped conversations, frenetic dance sequences; in Nayatt School, autobiography gives way to farce—slapstick routines, elaborate chases, aborted emotional interludes. But Gray's personal history is the trilogy's anchor. And that history will similarly anchor the series of signature comic lectures Gray delivers in the 1980s and '90s, "riding the solo/comedy wave from Downtown into the larger world" (as critic Laurie Stone puts it in her perceptive new essay on Gray's career and legacy).

Neither Gray nor Vawter are with us now in 2011. But the stories are: Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell, a three-year-old ensemble show of excerpts from his monologues and other writings, tours this month to Denver. Steven Soderbergh's new film And Everything Is Going Fine, a tribute to Gray distilled from 25 years of performance footage, is currently in theatres. And the storyteller's influence is palpable in the ongoing work of performers as various as John Leguizamo, Mike Daisey, Josh Kornbluth, Tim Miller and Holly Hughes, to name a few. For my generation of New York theatremakers and theatregoers, Spalding Gray's life—whether recounted in his inimitable monologues or transformed into revelatory stage moments by the Wooster Group—is iconic stuff, one of the essentials.

— Jim O'Quinn

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