..
.home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
..

Swimming to Cambodia
Spalding Gray

    Can it be that Spalding Gray is losing his edge? Well, maybe just a little. And not without some reason. First of all, it is a good 15 years since Swimming to Cambodia first knocked the stage world in the face, propelling the lanky New England author-actor into the stratosphere of one-person performers. Gray simply is older now – 60 to be exact. And he hasn’t been well. A broken hip, resulting from a car crash in June, seems to have taken its toll. He moves slowly on and off the stage. He speaks more slowly too, with a few more “ums” and long pauses than one recalls, robbing his delivery of some of the energy of yore.
    Which is not to discourage anybody from going to see the revival of  Swimming..., perhaps his best known performance piece, thanks to Jonathan Demme’s 1987 film. Gray remains a master monologist. There is no one who comes near him in telling a story  – with the possible exception of Anna Deveare Smith who, sadly, seems to have given up the genre for a recurring gig on The West Wing. Famed for a kind of emotional exhibitionism that would put even Woody Allen to shame, Gray uses himself as raw material, linking experience and neurotic fantasy to the delight of audiences who tend to view him as something of a cult figure.
    He has, as most of us do, mellowed over the years. His 1999 work, Morning, Noon and Night, extolled the pleasures of parenthood and took a gentler tone. Swimming to Cambodia, however, was much earlier and shows Gray at the height of his powers and the depths of his compulsions. Just the performer, at the by-now familiar long table holding his notes and a glass of water from which he frequently sips. Off to the side is a fanciful map of Cambodia, Thailand and environs, decorated with food at various points – a banana, a roast, a piece of cherry pie. He points to it with a red light pointer when the occasion arises.
    Swimming to Cambodia essentially is about Gray’s experiences as an actor in Roland Joffe’s film The Killing Fields. It is laden with Cambodian history at the time of the Viet Nam War, as well as insider movie lore. Lots of names are dropped: actors, playwrights, politicians and generals on several continents. Interspersed with the heavier stuff are descriptions of marijuana binges, sex shows in the bordellos of Bangkok and a curious dispute with Gray’s neighbor in New York. And quite a bit about the problematic relationship with his longtime collaborator and former girlfriend, Renee. She’s the one, by the way, who got dumped for his present wife, an emotional debacle described in detail in Morning, Noon and Night.
    There are harrowing details of the genocide in Cambodia that took some 2 million lives during the Pol Pot regime, punctuated with anecdotes: a sexually experimental sailor he met on a train journey; a description of a journalist’s ego; his own neurotic fear of sharks, remembered only when he is swimming in an uncharted sea.
    It’s a lot funnier than it sounds here, especially the prologue, a description of his accident and stay in an Irish country hospital. That part is new, obviously, since the accident happened quite recently but it’s worth the whole price of admission. Who but Spalding Gray could make you laugh out loud over a broken hip? Who but Spalding Gray would even try?