Remembering Spalding Gray

Recently I caught the 1984 movie The Killing Fields on TCM. It tells the story of an American journalist and his Cambodian translator during the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. This was one of those movies I had always meant to see and never got around to it so it was great to finally see it and learn more about a brutal moment in history that I knew little about.

It was also great to see it because one of the characters, an official at the American embassy, is played by the late, great Spalding Gray.

Gray was an actor and writer who became famous in the late 1980s and early 1990s for basically inventing the staged monologue. Halway between a one-person show and stand-up comedy, the monologues involved Gray sitting at a table and telling long, complicated, hilarious, heartfelt stories about his life and odd experiences. His first big monologue was Swimming to Cambodia in 1987, where he hilariously describes his time filming The Killing Fields a few years earlier -- and what a crazy experience it was. Swimming to Cambodia was released as a movie directed by Jonathan Demme and was a big success. This movie was followed by other great filmed monologues like Monster in a Box from 1991, about Gray's attempt to finish writing a book about his mother's death -- the monster being the ever growing, unable-to-be-finished manuscript that he takes with him to LA when he gets a gig writing a movie (his spends a long time comparing LA to NYC, declaring many times "Nobody walks in Los Angeles!"). Gray performed other popular filmed monologues while also having a successful career acting in movies and TV, and also publishing comic books and magazine articles.

Gray was from Rhode Island and you could hear it in his voice, but his life was the classic case of the kid from elsewhere who came to NYC full of dreams -- and made it. He was a self-made New Yorker, the kind of person who maybe grew up somewhere else but could never have lived as an adult anywhere else but here.

Sadly Gray's life was less than comical. He suffered from severe depression and at one point got into a car accident that left him in chronic pain. In early 2004, he committed suicide by jumping into the East River -- a great mind, a great talent cut-short by internal demons. But he left behind a wonderful body of work, his monologues are masterpieces of writing, performing, and great humanity.

So whatever sadness caused Gray to end his life so suddenly doesn't change the fact that his work gave me and so many others great joy.