INTERVIEW : Meet Our Newest Interviewer : How do you interview a guy who’s made a career of talking about himself? Easy--let Spalding Gray interview Spalding Gray

In his tale of an eye operation and the events leading up to it, actor Spalding Gray’s latest monologue “Gray’s Anatomy”--his 14th--continues his tradition of turning the particulars of his own life into epic storytelling.

Beginning this week, the 52-year-old actor best known for his monologues-turned-films “Swimming to Cambodia” (1987) and “Monster in a Box” (1992) brings “Gray’s Anatomy” to Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Irvine. He can also be seen in the recently released film “The Paper” and is currently filming in “Beyond,” starring Rosanna Arquette and directed by John Boorman.

Because talking about himself is something he does so well--and so often--and because he says he has become exhausted by the repetitiveness of being interviewed by journalists, we asked Gray to try something different: We invited him to interview himself, to ask himself the questions he’s never been asked. He agreed to the task, but responded that he couldn’t think of any question that he had never been asked in an interview. “I just started with the most often asked question, and the rest just followed , “ he told us when he turned in a 60-minute tape. What follows is a transcript of that tape, which Gray says has triggered him to begin thinking in terms of a new book called “Talking to Myself.”

Question: We’ll begin with the first question. What do you call what you do? I mean for work. Are you a monologuist? A performer? A performance artist? A storyteller? What?

Answer: The definition that I like the most for what I do came from a 10-year-old girl who I saw hanging around after one of my shows. And being surprised by how young she was I questioned, “What are you doing here?” And she said, “My dad said I had to come and see the talking man.” I liked that definition. I’m the man who sits behind a table and tells true stories from his life. I’m also an actor. I was trained as an actor at Emerson College and I use that training to play myself. With the help of my director, Renee Shafransky, I split myself in two and take the memory of myself in the past and develop that self as a character.

For instance, most of the events in my new monologue titled “Gray’s Anatomy” took place two or three years ago. I’m not in that same emotional or physical situation, so like any actor I have to recall and re-create a role. I’m like an introverted Method actor in that way.

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Q: Let me stop you again and just ask you how you came into this form. As a child, were you exposed to storytellers in your family?

A: No, no, just the opposite. There were no stories--nope, just the opposite. There were no stories, no personal historic narrative. I’m from New England and everything there gets kind of swept under the rug, so I think I began to talk in reaction to that. I was talking in reaction to repression. I can remember once some years back I was doing a taped interview with my father, trying to find out some facts about my personal history--you know, trying to find out who I was and how I came to be whatever it is I am--it was a kind of identity search and one question I asked him was “Why, out of his three sons, was I the only one that was not circumcised?” And his response was, “Oh, you’re not?”

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Q: Just tell me, briefly, how you came into the theatrical form.

A: Well, when I first came to New York City in 1967, I joined up with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group--where we worked in the Performing Garage in SoHo. We worked on making our own group pieces through improv so we all had a chance to be both actors and the creators of what it was we were making (although Schechner might have referred to it as performance, I still think of it as acting).

It was a very whole full kind of acting that bordered on music and dance because it employed our whole bodies and voices. But I’m sorry, let me get to the point or at least the point of your question. The most important part of that experience for me came during a production of our first piece called “Commune.” That was an environmental theater piece with no fixed seating. The audience just sat on risers and platforms all around us. There was a lot of audience participation in this piece--we called it a piece, not a play, because it really wasn’t a well-made play--so there was a lot of audience participation built into the work--when the action stopped--we’d go directly into the audience and involve them in some way, we had to interact with them.

So there was this one section in the piece about death and dying and Richard asked all of us, I think there were eight in the cast, to go into the audience and chose one person to deliver a personal story to about death. I know this sounds strange now but in those days most of the audience was wide open to this, wide open to this kind of encounter. I mean, they were consistently receptive. So each night I would go out and find someone--I think it was almost always a woman--and I would tell the story of how when I was in Mexico in 1967 my mother killed herself by starting up my father’s car and asphyxiating herself in the garage. And the story I told was of my return home and all the details I remembered that grew out of that traumatic return. And those details were etched in my memory and I could see it all like a film in my head as I spoke it.

This really was my first monologue. It was hardly performed at all, just spoken directly into the eyes of a stranger--well, not quite a stranger, a member of our audience. This event was extremely powerful for me--for at least two reasons. One was that it helped me to break through my fear of looking directly at the audience--you see every actor, in film or stage is never, or rarely, allowed to do that, so that produces, of course, a great desire to break that taboo and have direct contact with the eyes of the viewer--at least that was true for me. And the experience was very powerful. It changed the whole way I thought about theater. I was no longer just interested in looking at my fellow actors on stage, I was now yearning to relate to the audience.

The other powerful thing that happened in that event was the fact that I was publicly breaking the taboo around my mom’s suicide. It was never openly known that she had killed herself. It was all sort of covered up--the shame. Her obituary just read Margaret Elizabeth Horton Gray, deceased. And then, of course, there were rumors as there are always rumors when you don’t tell the whole truth. There were rumors that she died of cancer. So for me it was so important to set the story straight. You know, tell it right. Also, it was very important for me to tell the story in order to heal myself through the telling--you know, to try to make sense of it. It was a way both of mourning her and accepting the gigantic horror of the event. I can see that you want to ask another question so just let me finish by telling you that this one event liberated me in such a way that by 1967 I had co-founded the Wooster Group with Elizabeth LeCompte and we created a piece together called “Rumstick Road”--this piece of theater was a most powerful alchemistic event for me--and opened the door to my monologues.

I haven’t got time to tell you about that piece in any detail, nor could I capture it in words--it was for me a true theatrical masterpiece. But one thing I want to point out is that it led me on to taking myself as a character. At the very beginning of it I would step forward and speak directly to the audience, and I would say, “My name is Spalding Gray, Spud, Spud Gray,” so that it was clear that I was playing myself and also Elizabeth LeCompte was directing me to play myself, or at least a theatrical aspect of me. It was she and the Wooster Group that taught me that ability to split myself and play certain aspects of myself exactly like an actor would play a character or role. And of course the monologues grew out of that.

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Q: Speaking of directors, don’t you work with Renee Shafransky as a director now?

A: Yes, Renee directed my last two monologues, “Monster in a Box” and “Gray’s Anatomy.” And she has been invaluable to me. She’s worked not only as a director but as a co-creator. Much of the consciously written parts of “Gray’s Anatomy” are hers. I don’t do actual writing, I just talk--and Renee supplied some actual writing to the piece. Let me make you aware, in case you’re not, that none of my monologues are previously written. I’m an oral writer and I’ve evolved all my monologues from the beginning in front of an audience. Because Renee and I have lived together for so long, she has always been around that evolution and I’d always be listening to her feedback--she was a kind of psychic mirror for me, I mean she perceived me often like a character and would reflect that back to me. And this worked very well because she not only has a fine eye for directing, but because she is also a good writer with a concentration on screenplays. Really, from early on, Renee had a lot of input to the monologues. So, of course, it was only natural for her to become the director.

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Q: Please tell me just a little of how you work together, say in the development of “Gray’s Anatomy.”

A: Working from my outline I start first with a linear recollection. All that I remember about the events as well as all the other associative personal stories that grow up around that event. And I tell that to my first audience. I make tape recordings of these early performances. Then Renee and I sit down and work with those tapes. Like you’d work with any text. We begin to make a dramatic structure together. I’d give you examples of that but I don’t want to give away the stories in “Gray’s Anatomy.” You can see and enjoy that for yourself. Just suffice it to say that we make dramatic changes based on original truths. We use hyperbole and rearrangement of the way events occur in time. So together we evolve the monologue into a well-structured lyrical dramatic piece. That’s where it is now. And, of course, it’s never finished until I stop performing it. It’s always open and flexible.

Renee is also directing me all the time to play myself as I was three years ago when most of the events took place. This works very well because Renee lived through those events with me and has her own memory of them. So it is in fact two personal memories interacting. And that really makes “Gray’s Anatomy” so much more complex. It makes it much more than a solo work. I may be performing but Renee’s presence--it is completely interwoven in that performance. I really don’t know how I would make a monologue without her. The other wonderful thing that has grown out of working with Renee as a director is that it has reconnected me with the ability to take direction as a film actor. It’s also freed Renee up to direct other actors in more traditional plays, which she is doing right now.

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Q: Please tell us something about your film work, I mean other than the films you have made of your monologues. But first, one question before you answer that. Why do you think “Swimming to Cambodia” works so well as a film? Why would an audience want to see a film of one man talking?

A: Well, first of all I was lucky to work with a very talented director, Jonathan Demme. That made a world of difference. But in all humility I have to say “Swimming to Cambodia” was a radical breakthrough in film because it was so relentlessly minimal. And I think it worked because your regular film audience comes into the theater with expectations of imagery.

And you have to understand there is a certain audience that will not go see a live show. They feel more comfortable in movie theaters because that’s where they’ve been going all their lives; they just haven’t been accustomed to going to the theater. So there’s a whole new audience there that wouldn’t have come to see me live. Now they’re coming to see a movie, and what makes a good movie is imagery.

Of course text is important but when we think of film we usually think of images. And in the case of “Swimming,” I was creating the image with words through my performance and gesture. This throws the audience back on their own imaginations. They have to interact with their own personal images which I am provoking and are constantly growing out of my narrative.

In other words, most films literalize reality into a selected image. What I was doing, and am still doing, is close to what I grew up with as a kid, radio, good old radio. Oh, how I loved it because I could create my own image of what was not seen but only heard. We did not have a TV in our home until I was 11 years old. So I had all those years of “Ozzie and Harriet” on radio first, and I created Ozzie and Harriet’s house in my mind, as well as David and Rick and Ozzie and Harriet. I mean, just think of the name Ozzie, what does that do to you? Doesn’t it tickle your imagination? What image do you have of an Ozzie?

Radio allowed me to be a creator and TV stole that creation from me by literalizing and to some extent limiting my vision. Suddenly we had their house as chosen and given by a TV production company. The audience seeing “Swimming” has to make their own images and I think on the whole they like that. I mean, for many people it’s a new experience, particularly for the younger audience. The other wonderful aspect of “Swimming” being made into a film had to do with the fact that much of the narrative in the monologue was about the making of a film--”The Killing Fields.” So then when the monologue became a film it was wonderfully self-reflective in its medium--celluloid commenting on celluloid--it became a film talking about a film; it became a lovely satellite to the original planet, “The Killing Fields.” And so I see them as two films spinning around each other. At best they should be seen together as a unit work of art.

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Q: Now would you mind saying a few words about your more commercial film work?

A: When people used to ask me why I got involved with Hollywood films, I would say jokingly that it was for the health insurance. Then I thought that the powers that be in Hollywood got wind of that and decided to play a sick joke on me. In my paranoid mind I thought they said, “All right. He’s doing it for the health insurance? Well, then, let’s cast him as a doctor for the rest of his life.” And they started casting me as doctors. But that seems to be over now and things are looking brighter. First of all, I want to say I have no complaints about my experiences with commercial films. I’ve had nothing but good experiences and I’m very happy that my film work has become even more interesting and creative for me lately. I seem to be moving away from the doctors and into a more varied world of characters. And I really do see myself as having the potential of becoming a very good character actor. Most recently I’ve had the good fortune of acting in a number of good projects. Those were “King of the Hill,” “The Tool Shed” (not yet released), “The Paper,” and now I’m blessed to be working with John Boorman on his latest project, which has the potential of being as powerful and as historically revelatory as “The Killing Fields.”

Working with Steven Soderbergh on his film “King of the Hill” was particularly important for me, first of all because he chose me--I was his first choice--that had never happened to me before. I always felt, you know, easily replaced or expendable or that they were just casting me for my WASP patrician look. Steven didn’t even screen test me, we just ate lunch together in New York City at Jerry’s and he told me he chose me to play the role of Mr. Mungo from reading my novel “Impossible Vacation” and immediately I thought, “What an interesting way to cast someone in a film--to be cast through my writing.” Steven said he saw my “character” of Brewster North in my autobiographic novel as a man being ruled by regret, which for him was the key to Mr. Mungo’s character.

The other important thing that happened in that film was that Steven and the role allowed me to express my sense of deep sadness. In my own monologue work I see myself as a humorist and at the bottom of all humorists you will almost always find a deep well of sadness. In my monologues I feel often under some pressure to make the audience laugh--although, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that, but Steven allowed my sadness to surface publicly for the first time. Previous to that most Hollywood casting agents only reacted to my kind of WASP exterior. But Steven and his casting director Deborah Aquila saw something else under that image, and he went for it, and so did I. Also that film was strongly connected to my autobiography, and I think that always helps an actor find his or her personal line to a role.

If you haven’t seen “King of the Hill,” and you should, you can see it on video now. The character I play, Mr. Mungo, ends up committing suicide. This was a very powerful scene for me because it was shot in the summer which was the time my mother had killed herself in 1967, at age 52. And I was just approaching 52, and all these fears were surfacing that I would somehow repeat that act in order to join her wherever she was--that she was pulling me to her through suicide. You see, my mother actually told me a year before she killed herself how she planned to do it. And I didn’t take her seriously. And I did not take any action to warn my father to please hide the keys to the car, just keep them out of sight. Then a year later, while I was spending the summer in Mexico, she did exactly what she said she wanted to do. She got up in the night while my father and younger brother were asleep and went out into the garage and started up the car and that was it. I returned from Mexico to find that she was only ashes in an urn in a cardboard box beside my father’s bed. So there I was, years later, at almost 52 years old, getting to create my own suicide. The scene took all day to shoot, starting with the very realistic makeup job of slit wrists complete with dried blood running out of the wounds and down my hand.

The odd thing about this choice of suicide in the film was that it had fit right into some recent pre-film fantasies I had had of how I would do it--how I would commit suicide in real life. They were only fantasies, mind you, and still it was very present in my consciousness and it was most present when I was performing my monologues in Taos, N.M., and staying at a hotel in town--there was a very large outdoor Jacuzzi and I was thinking the way I’d do it would be to take a good dose of Quaaludes, then take a very sharp straight-edged razor and get into that tub until I reached a state of complete relaxation--a state I’ve hardly ever known in my sober life before, and then just draw that razor down both wrists and lie back in my own hot blood and expire. Of course at the time I was aware that this was only a fantasy--I didn’t own a straight-edged razor nor did I have any Quaaludes--still it was a very intense one that kept coming back on me. And in the end I thought the combination of the hot tub and the Quaaludes would make me feel so good, so relaxed, that I’d just give up on the razor and relax and live.

Then it all was just a few months later that I was in Steven’s film and it was not a hot tub but just a hotel room in which I was doing the slashing. But there was the straight-edged razor right on the sink, and me with my wrists looking exactly like they’d been slashed. And there I had to sit for hours, slumped over that sink while special effects had to create a condition where the blood and water from the sink overflowed and ran along the floor and out under the door where Aaron, the young boy that Mungo had befriended, discovered and followed it to the ultimate horrible image of my body slumped over the sink--or Mungo’s body--which for me at the time were interchangeable.

This is a very powerful scene for me because of all the associations of mixed identification. I was me, Mungo and my mom, as well as Aaron finding me/Mom in Mungo. It was also very illuminating for me because I was forced to sit there for so long and stare at all that mess the blood made, and it made me realize what a selfish, horrible mess a suicide is for those who have to deal with it and clean it up. Then one of those strange behind-the-scenes events occurred which I always love. It’s as though doing a film often provokes a film reality in me that I carry off the location, and in this case this was an extreme and perfect example of it.

I was in a real rush to catch a flight out that night because Renee and I had rented a nice and expensive house in the Hamptons for the month of August and because of the film I had spent very little time there and it looked like we might not finish the suicide scene in time for me to catch my flight due to the fact that the crew had to set up and re-light for my last scene in which they carry my body out covered by a sheet on a stretcher. So I asked Steven if there was any way they could use a stand-in or, in this case maybe they call it a “lie-in” for me. And Steven half-jokingly and half-seriously said, “What, Spalding, don’t you want to be in my movie?” I laughed (a little) and said, “All right, Steven. I’ll do it if you’ll let me run back to the hotel, pack my bag and check out so I’ll be all ready to go straight to the airport.” And to my amazement he agreed. So out I headed dressed in this 1929 outfit with an ashen white face, slit wrists and dried blood streaming down my hands. The hotel was only a few blocks from the location and to my amazement I got there without turning a single head. The only person that reacted to me was a homeless person asking for change in front of the post office. As soon as he saw me coming, he ran.

Then checking out of the hotel the woman at the front desk, knowing I was an actor in a film, asked me how the film was going and I just lifted my slit wrists and she, fully in control because she was aware that I was, after all really just an actor and this reality was all part of the film, and she said, “Oh, gross-out!”

No, that was not enough for me. I just had the strong urge not to leave that hotel until I affected someone in some real way. So feeling like a little kid at Halloween I proceeded diabolically toward the hotel pharmacy and upon entering discovered it empty except for a woman who was behind the counter filling prescriptions. She was just about my mother’s age when my mother had killed herself and I just walked right up to the counter and with my sleeves rolled up held up my slit wrists and said, “Do you have anything for my wounds?” She turned as pale as I was and staggered back and, grasping one of the medicine cabinets to steady herself, she sputtered, “We have Mercurochrome.” And that’s when I knew she was in shock. Mercurochrome, I thought, that fits right in with the period of the movie. Iodine, maybe, but Mercurochrome? Then as she rushed to get it, she said, “Whatever happened to you?” And I said, “Oh, I just slit my wrists.”

It was only then that I pulled out of this bizarre diabolical reality I’d created and realized I was re-enacting yet another aspect of the whole suicide scene. I was casting this poor pharmacy prescription filler as my mother and in my own strange dramatic way was saying, “Look, Mom, I can do it too!” As soon as I had that realization I was all apologies and told her I was only an actor working on a film nearby. Then I fled out of shame, leaving her in a state I will never know. Later I thought it was a wonder the whole event didn’t provoke her to have a heart attack. It was all a very odd event, and one I’m not proud of. It was a very clear and weird case of what would be called, I suppose, “acting out.” Well, I’ve always had a problem with boundaries and that day I just overflowed. That’s the end of the answer.

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Q: Did you make your flight back to New York that night?

A: No, I didn’t.

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Q: I just have two more questions.

A: Oh, too bad. I was hoping we could go on a little longer.

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Q: Well, I’d love to but I’m afraid we have to wrap it up. You have to realize this is for the L.A. Times, which is only a newspaper, and you talk like a book.

A: OK, shoot. What are the last two questions?

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Q: I’ll be brief. The question is: Can you think of a director you’d like to work with on a particular film project? And what would that project be?

A: That’s a tough one. I’d love to work with Jodie Foster, Jane Campion, Jonathan Demme, Stephen Frears. I’d very much like to work with Peter Weir, I’d love to work with Ron Howard and Steven Soderbergh again, as well as Renee Shafransky. I mean, there are so many fine and talented directors out there to work with. But as for projects, that’s a whole other story. That’s a tough one. I just don’t think I’m ethnic enough. I mean, who wants to do a story about an existential uptight doubting New Englander? I suppose I might fit into an Updike story, I might be perfect for that. But look who they cast in the last one, “The Witches of Eastwick.” Hah, not a chance for me there. Oh, that reminds me of a story about another talented director, Paul Mazursky. I was working with him on “The Pickle,” playing yet another doctor, and I was hanging out in my dressing room receiving lessons from a real doctor on how to give Danny Aiello a realistic blood pressure workup, and Paul burst into my dressing room with that enthusiastic way he has. He was on his break and he came in with all this energy and enthusiasm and said, “You know, Spalding, I had forgotten that you are a really good actor. I keep thinking of you as a storyteller. But you’re also a great actor. In fact, I think you’d be perfect to play the role of John Cheever when someone at last makes the John Cheever story.” I said, “Right on! Sure! You direct it and see if you can raise the money on my name playing a very talented complex depressed drunken bisexual writer living on the Hudson River. That one is sure to capture the hearts and imaginations of America.” Anyway, let me finish by telling you, I do have one fantasy project and that is to play opposite Madonna in the remake of “The Blue Angel.”

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Q: OK. Wonderful. Now for the last question. Back to your own work for this one. I noticed that you work a lot out of fear. What is your big one? What is your big fear?

A: My big fear is that I lack the courage it takes to live a real life. And by that I mean to really sit in it, feel and be in it. To dive into life, if you know what I mean. I’m afraid I treat life too much like theater. I frame it in a story and run from frame to frame. I’m always controlling it, I’m always creating it. The shadow side of my art form is that I’m so good at storytelling that I can now tell the story before I have the feeling.

Storytelling can become a defense against just feeling and being, a defense against living. I’ll give you an example and we’ll end with that. Last summer Renee and I were at a Lincoln Center after-show party at Tavern on the Green. I had been Upstate and traveled in to meet her there. I thought I’d be late for the show because I’d encountered a couple of accidents along the way--one was on the highway and had held up traffic for quite a while; the other was on Metro North, some minor derailment problem. Anyway, I made it on time after all. And as we were leaving the party Renee and I caught a cab just outside Tavern on the Green. We were pulling out of the parking lot and there was a three-car collision on Central Park West right in front of us. It was a real mess. And one of the vehicles was an open jeep, and this poor man had cracked the windshield with his head and he was rocking back and forth in shock and pain. And as soon as Renee saw that she burst into tears. And I immediately said, “Wow, that’s the third accident I’ve encountered today.” I just neatly fit it into my ongoing narrative. I’m working a little bit on all that in therapy now--how to make a crack in the narrative to let the feelings in. It takes a good therapist to do that because there’s nothing people love more than a good story and we all just want it to go on and on and on.

* Gray will perform “Gray’s Anatomy” at UCLA’s Wadsworth Theatre Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., UCSB’s Campbell Hall, April 27-28 8 p.m. and Irvine Barclay Theatre May 1, 3 p.m. “Gray’s Anatomy” is available in paperback by Vintage.