Spalding Gray Segment From Swimming To Cambodia (On Cold War Soldier)

                           Uniqueness of Contemporary Playwright Spalding Gray

“I say that I can`t make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I`m cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling
you`re always in control, you`re like God.” /Spalding Gray/

 Spalding Gray was a famous American film actor, contemporary playwright, and screenwriter. He was also a talented theatre and television actor who wrote and performed his own roles in the films “Monster in a Box” and Gray`s Anatomy”, which became his most memorable performances.

 Spalding Rockwell Gray was born in 1941, in province, Rhode Island. After he graduated Emerson
College, he began to perform in Off-Broadway plays as a supporting actor. Gray is best known for his
monologues and he had an amazing talent for live performances. He was also a co-founder of the Wooster
heater Group in New York, where he performed his first monologue “Sex and Death at the Age of 14" in 1977.

  Even though Spalding had appeared on television numerous times, the greatest glory and national attention was brought to him from his play “Swim to Cambodia”, which was written in 1985 and filmed in 1987. Thanks to his play, he received the Guggenhiem Fellowship and a National Book Award. In 1992 Gray published his only novel “Impossible vacation”, based on his personal life experiences. Spalding Gray became a writer and an artist of an original genre. He invented a very unusual and rare form among artists. His autobiographical monologues people call “epic monologues” because first they were spoken and then written down. He also minimized all things in his plays, using just a table, a glass of water, his notebook and a mic. By just simply sitting and telling the audience the stories of his life, Spalding Gray portrayed himself in a huge world, using his unique style of writing and acting. At that time, there was really no one like him. He created a new kind of theatre piece for the solo performer, named “talking pieces”. Gray improvised from his memories, free associations, and he told the audiences about his childhood, his adventures as a young man, his struggles and private emotions. He also used old family photograph albums and slide projections. “He
was the most fantastic raconteur”, says his close friend Ken Kobland. “ He would come home at night, and we`d open cans of India pale ale, and he`d tell the story of his day. And we would just be totally broken up by this. He`d describe the symmetry of the world with such wit and self-awareness, such incredibly
rich detail and complexity. It was…talent is a funny word- it was a gift, a madness.”

Unfortunately, Spalding Gray suffered severe injuries in a car crash in 2001, and after that he suffered from deep depression and severe pain. He committed suicide at the age of 62. However, the world remembers him as the greatest American storyteller of his generation, a performer who turned his life into a series of brightly incisive monologues.