Spalding Gray's America (review)

{ 242 } Book Reviews Although this volume can be read independently of the first, as it contains an excellent introduction that summarizes the arguments presented previously , they are best understood as companion volumes, focusing first on privacy and then on publicity as individuals struggled over the course of the long eighteenth century to articulate personal identities. This volume and its companion are highly recommended for scholars of performance studies, sexuality, gender studies, English Renaissance and Restoration theatre, and historians of the period. Its implications are profound and far-­ reaching and will be rippling though numerous fields for years to come. A must read. Scott S. Boston — Bowling Green State University \ \ Spalding Gray’s America. By William W. Demastes. Foreword by Richard Schechner. New York: Hal Leonard Corporation, Limelight Editions, 2008. xxiii + 272 pp. $19.95 paper. Spalding Gray’s America is the first and long-­ overdue monograph on the actor and performance artist (1941–2004) whose career spanned almost forty years. One reason for this delay, until four years after Gray followed his mother’s example and killed himself, is his arguable representativeness. This may seem surprising for this “‘typical’ middle Ameri­ can” (6), born and raised in Barrington , Rhode Island, educated at Fichton Academy, Maine, and Emerson College , Massachusetts, before making his first moves into the traditional theatre as an actor of the Alley Theatre in Houston. After five years in the traditional theatre (1965–70), Gray passed almost a decade in the experimental surroundings of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group before turning to the monologue format with which he ended up being identified for the remainder of his life, despite excursions into film, television , and novel writing. Still, being of WASP New England stock made Gray stand out in multicultural America, while his avant-­ garde credentials and reputed mental problems rendered him equally suspicious when he came to play the stage manager in Gregory Mosher’s 1988 revival of Wilder’s all-­ Ameri­ can Our Town. Gray was also met by skepticism, at times even downright hostility, when with Travels to New England he extended the idea of Interviewing the Au­ dience (1980) to non-­ performance spaces. The more Gray was associated with “Manhattan, that island off the coast of America,” the less he could pass as the Everyman whom Demastes makes him out to be (119). { 243 } Book Reviews The major strategies Gray relied on to draw his audiences in, Demastes argues, are an amiably naive stage persona, humor, and the instillment of a complicity, as when the spectators to the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road were forced to listen to the private interviews Gray had had with his grandmother, his father, and his mother’s psychiatrist (54). Swimming to Cambodia owns up to a similar complicity when drawing parallels between the U.S. involvement in southeast Asia and the movie crew’s exploitation of the Asians during Roland Joffe’s shooting of The Killing Fields (116). The impact of Gray’s avant-­ garde period thus extended beyond the 1970s into his autobiographical monologues, a point also informing Demastes’s Beyond Naturalism (1988) with regard to the 1960s experimentalism and the so-­ called new realist Ameri­ can theatre of Rabe, Mamet, Shepard, Fuller, Henley, and Norman. The documentary dimension of Gray’s solo work, adhering so closely to his everyday experiences, seems to inscribe it into that arguably retrograde but ever so popular category of realist theatre—if it were not for Gray’s irony, that “fatal”postmodern strategy, and his associative method, which are at odds with the Aristotelian tradition and well-­ made play. But there is method to Gray’s madness, even in India and After (America) (1979), his first solo piece, where his scattered anecdotes and fragmented recollections were cued by the definition of words randomly chosen from a dictionary to convey his personal disorientation during the Performance Group’s tour of Mother Courage. In his foreword to Demastes’s book, Schechner ascribes Gray’s breakdown to his company’s artistic failure as much as to “a fault line” in the performer’s personality (xvi, xviii– xix), since art should achieve a reflexive balance between the personal, the social...