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July 18, 2006 performance reviewed by Charles Agar.

Leftover Stories to Tell, a one-night-only show honoring the memory of writer, actor, and monologist Spalding Gray lit up a muggy evening at the Guthrie Center in Housatonic. The show opens what will be an ongoing series of spoken-word performances held in cooperation with the center, Arlo Guthrie’s non-profit educational foundation, and Blue Flower Arts, which sponsors literary readings, lectures, and performances.

Spalding Gray would have been 65 in June of this year. He died in an apparent suicide in January of 2004, and Leftover Stories to Tell is an evening celebrating his work and life. Gray was tortured by years of depression, which became acute after a 2001 car accident in Ireland. While his suicide evidences his self torture and pain – in fact that is what so much of Gray’s unhinged monologue performances are about – Leftover Stories to Tell gives voice to a more complex man capable of great joy in “just being.”

As an actor, Gray performed in films like The Killing Fields and Beaches, as well as in a Broadway production of Our Town, but his career, like everything about his life, was just grist for the mill for Gray’s pen. Best know for Swimming to Cambodia, the story of his neurosis during the making of The Killing Fields and a performance that was made into a popular film by Jonathan Demme, Grey performed many one man shows and wrote prolifically.

Leftover Stories to Tell is a staged reading from journals and monologues from throughout Gray’s life. For fans of Gray’s work the night was nothing short of a resurrection; for the uninitiated, an introduction to the delightful and absurd mind of Spalding Gray. By voicing the inappropriate, or by his extreme example of fear and neurosis, Gray helps us laugh at ourselves, the absurdity of what it is to be human and full of flaws and fears. Gray’s writing implicates us somehow, draws us into a world of teenage suppressed laughter or the uncomfortable, ridiculous machination of early encounters with the opposite sex. Gray tells stories you can smell, and nothing is taboo, from the scatological to admissions of envy, greed, and lust. He holds up a mirror to our humanness.

The cast includes Sam Waterston, who appeared with Gray in The Killing Fields and is best known for his role in the TV drama L.A. Law, as well as journalist John Hockenberry, actors Jay O. Sanders, Maria Tucci, Hazelle Goodman, Ain Gordon, and recognizable Peter Riegert of Animal House and Crossing Delancey fame. These performers know Gray, some even doing a reasonable impression of his dry, one-eyebrow-raised delivery, and the readers seem to enjoy and laugh along with his wild prose. One of the highlights of the evening was Hazelle Goodman’s rousing telling of Gray’s visit to a New Age sweat lodge – the audience laughing along empathetically in the heat of the muggy night.

Gray is like a neurotic Curious George who finds himself in the strangest predicaments: in jail in L.A., on a beach in Thailand, or picked up as a day laborer to go and clean a synagogue in Brooklyn. He has a knack for getting into drama, and a knack for telling it. Haunted by ghosts and memories – Gray’s mother committed suicide – writing is, according to Gray, a way of letting his “raging past” out of him. And it is in his writing that he hoped he could “put together the pieces of life to create a conscious whole.” Far from his New England roots and a time when he admits he believed in “God and eternity,” an aging Gray says of his hyper-observed life that when “God stops looking, he (Gray) starts.”

In Leftover Stories we hear a bittersweet letter of regret and condolence from Gray to the city of New York on September 11, 2001, a day when he was too busy moving to Long Island to be able to help his friend in a time of need. We hear of his joys in fatherhood and the moment of pure “being” when looking into the trusting eyes of his infant son, or of being perfectly “present” in a visceral plunge into a river near the Grand Canyon. Gray says that his life was like writing “against a deadline,” and that “the best we can expect is a few gracious moments in time.” The performance ends with a portrait of Gray doing a frenetic Chumbawumba dance with his family in the living room – perhaps one of his last moments of grace. Gray’s neurosis and psychological pain is the stuff of his art, but Gray’s own muse proved too much in the end.

Leftover Stories to Tell originally premiered in New York, then ran briefly in Los Angeles. After this pared down performance at the Guthrie Center, the show will return to New York for another phase of production. Keep an eye out for further spoken word performances at the Guthrie Center.

The Guthrie Center  | guthriecenter.org.
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