The Journals of Spalding Gray ed. by Nell Casey (review)

In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, I was nearly always in attendance when Spalding Gray performed his monologues in New York, first at the Performing Garage on Wooster St. and then on various Lincoln Center stages. In low-key, fallen gentry mode, he directly eyed his audience and shared overly personal stories about embarrassment and death and sex and fear and disease, with his dry comedian’s timing and his posthippie tragedian’s text. As we watched, he talked the fine line between perceptive self-scrutiny and tiresome self-absorption. He had a notebook open in front of him (next to the essential props of water glass and pitcher) and at odd moments advanced the pages. But he rarely glanced at it. I always wished I could see what was on those pages, and Nell Casey’s edited journals have retrospectively granted me that wish. I’m not surprised that the journals feel a bit empty without those overly long pauses when he took a sip from his water glass.