STAGE REVIEW : Gray Lets Hang-Ups Out of ‘Box’

There is a healthy addiction abroad in this land known as the Spalding Gray monologue. Apparently, it has reached epidemic proportions. Gray’s latest Los Angeles solo outing--”Monster in a Box” that opened Tuesday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center for two weeks--is, we’re told, virtually sold out. There are isolated singles and a standby line that forms each night at 6. Pray for no-shows.

Of course, there are also those among you who may be asking just about now, Spalding who . . . ?

Gray’s name became more of a household word when another of his 13 monologues, “Swimming to Cambodia,” was made into a film by Jonathan Demme. Sudden fame has not displeased him.

Over the years that he’s been systematically confiding in the audience or inviting it to confide in him (this writer saw him do both for the first time in 1983), Gray has become a highly polished raconteur--an intimate of thousands, able to draw you into his quirky world and demonstrate how zaniness seeks him out the way rain clouds form over Woodstock’s head. He may be the nation’s most entertaining neurotic as well as its outstanding storyteller.

But on the eve of turning 50, Spalding Gray’s neuroses have never looked better. The bod is supertrim, the gray hair shines, the eyes sparkle, the tone is bright. And “Monster in a Box,” in keeping with this apparent psychological rebirth, is Gray’s liveliest monologue to date.

Funniest too. The stage is bare except for a table and chair. The “Monster,” as he explains the moment he sits in front of the table that holds a script, a mike and a cardboard box, is a book he’s been writing called “Impossible Vacations,” “due to be published by Knopf two years ago.” It’s in the box--all 1,900 pages of it, neatly trussed between hard covers.

So much for the tome, which is about a New Englander named Brewster North incapable of taking a vacation. The monologue is not about that, he tells us, but about the interruptions that stood in the way of the writing. And we’re off.

The first of those interruptions was self-inflicted. When writing at the MacDowell Colony became a stifling orgy of peace, quiet, writing, eating and walking and walking and writing, he fled to L.A. where a pre-Jesse Helms National Endowment grant awaited him at the Mark Taper Forum--that and a driver with a “35-m.p.h. consciousness.”

Gray’s misadventures in the City of Angels, where the entire population is writing a screenplay and only comes out for earthquakes, form a good portion of this evening. Being local, they draw the biggest laughs. And the most predictable. But his sketch of Creative Artists Agency staffers at the ready, addicted to health and wealth, is absolutely priceless. And only he can turn his fascination with windows with a view (where you can go morning to evening, watching the sun’s patterns through the trees without missing a beat) into pure hilarity.

The old neurotic self is in there too, of course, agonizing over the handling of a “pedantic psychotic American” on a fact-finding mission to Nicaragua--or unreasonably possessed of a hypochondriacal fear of AIDS triggered by an innocent spider bite.

Gray’s ambivalence about the Christian Science of his upbringing and the psychoanalysis of his adulthood (do you acknowledge or banish a disease by naming it?) is also there. As is his mother’s suicide, present in other monologues, which threads its way through this one too, but in a less tormented context, as a concern of alter ego Brewster North. (Gray’s own effort to serve on the suicide hot line ends when it’s politely suggested that he needs therapy!)

Ultimately, it’s Gray’s reminiscences of a trip to the Soviet Union and of his recent Broadway outing as the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” that leave us gasping for air. In what must be a performer’s dream revenge, he skewers his critics at least as surgically as they skewered him, name by name.

No one can piece a story out of a network of digressions as organically as Gray, jump more nimbly from apples to coconuts or create a full-fledged event out of the simplest trivia. Nothing eludes his eye or the sureness of his satire.

What may have started out as a witting or unwitting component of psychotherapy has become an intensely personal and highly refined art form. Gray has never been better and the secret of his success is the skewed angle of vision--his eccentric wit and ruthless candor, whether dealing with flatulence, flying saucers or fear of flying (“I won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation”).

For a man who sees health as “the transformation of hysterical misery into common unhappiness,” “Monster in a Box” has a daunting ring of normalcy. Help. We need Gray’s neuroses for the sake of our own addictions. After all, when you’re hooked, you’re hooked.

* “ Monster in a Box,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends June 30. $25; (213) 627-5599. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

‘Monster in a Box’

Spalding Gray: Spalding Gray

A Los Angeles Theatre Center presentation. Director Renee Shafransky. Writer Spalding Gray. Lights Douglas D. Smith. Sound Mark Friedman. Stage manager Michael F. Wolf.