In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Spalding Gray's Last Interview
  • Theresa Smalec (bio)

I

On January 9th 2004 I interviewed Spalding Gray for the purpose of my dissertation research. Roughly twenty-four hours later, he went missing. Though I find it odd to frame my intentions in this manner, my essay is, at least in part, an effort to solve a mystery: Why did Gray agree to meet and discuss the life of Ron Vawter on the day before he killed himself? It is also an effort to grasp my relationship to the death of a stranger, a man whom I knew for little over an hour. Since Gray's disappearance, I've struggled with an awkward recognition that our interview was the scene of something larger than a conversation about Vawter's past, even though it was rooted in Gray's memories of the personal and professional journeys they had taken together, first as members of The Performance Group, then of The Wooster Group. I use the word "scene" cautiously, at once resisting and embracing its reference to theatre. While I do not wish to claim Gray treated our interview as an orchestrated show, I now intuit that he used the occasion of remembering Vawter to address an audience in addition to me. What initially seemed like a rare opportunity to capture Gray's thoughts on a deceased friend and colleague later struck me as the performer's final effort to see himself through Vawter's eyes, and to imagine the ways in which others might see and respond to his decision to end his life/story.

The image of a dying man seeking an audience will surely offend some people. There is a sense in which we are more at ease with viewing suicide as a rash and profoundly isolated act. Yet over the past three years, I've uncovered a body of writing suggesting that my hunch about the hybrid nature of our encounter—private and public, coincidental and tactical—is correct. The performance scholar Della Pollock has theorized the unspoken expectations that underlie the oral history interview in this way: "The interviewer is her/himself a symbolic presence, standing in for other, unseen audiences and invoking a social compact: a tacit agreement that what is heard will be integrated into public memory and social knowledge in such a way that . . . it will make a material difference."1 On a more concrete level, there is Gaby Woods's article, published in The Guardian to mark the first anniversary of Gray's death. Among the former friends and confidantes of Gray whom Woods quotes is Oliver [End Page 1] Sacks, a neurologist who treated the actor from August 2003 until almost the end of his life. "On several occasions," Sacks explains, "he talked about what he called a creative suicide." The therapist recalls a particularly troubling fantasy that Gray shared with him: "On one occasion, when he was being interviewed, he thought that the interview might be culminated with 'a dramatic and creative suicide.' I was at pains to say that he would be more creative alive than dead."2

I was not aware of Gray's thoughts on how an interview might set the stage for his death until August 2007, as I finished writing this piece. I was, however, already conscious of my intermediary role during our 2004 meeting. I brought a tape recorder with the intent of gathering information to publish in my dissertation. Gray made his recognition of my role as a go-between more explicit in his response to my closing query about whether he needed to review the tape before I used it publicly. He declined, assuring me he hadn't said anything he considered to be "off the record." Our seemingly private exchange was, in effect, a public artifact. Moreover, it was a document to be shared with Gray's loved ones at a future date. When I impulsively offered to send a copy of the transcript to Kathleen Russo—Gray's wife and the person who'd facilitated our meeting—he softly agreed that I should. This was the last time I saw Gray: as I stood in his doorway, promising to disseminate his words...

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