THEATER REVIEW : ‘Anatomy’: Good for What Ails You

Spalding Gray’s a sick man.

Lucky us.

In “Gray’s Anatomy,” his funniest and most profound monologue since “Swimming to Cambodia,” the middle-aged crazies take possession of America’s first neurotic and No. 1 storyteller.

This self-described WASP Woody Allen has hit 50 and his body is slipping into “the Bermuda Triangle of Health.” Gray’s first sign of physical decay is a “macula pucker”--a growth on the retina of his left eye--and his search for a miraculous cure sends Gray on increasingly bizarre pilgrimages, from New Jersey’s New Age nutritionists to the Philippines’ psychic surgeons. His trips become a howl of high anxiety and hilarity.

But they’re trips without slides, maps or props. This tour guide’s exquisitely refined actor’s voice takes us there. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans, Gray meanders onto the stage and sits at a simple table. His only props are a notebook and a glass of water. He cozily leans into a microphone, like a friend in a bar about to confess a secret. We can barely hear his first words: “I think it all began when. . . .”

Thank the entertainment gods that Gray wasn’t diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Gray’s minimalist stage art depends on remembrances of things past. He’s a Proustian camera and his memory works as film. He calls this technique “poetic journalism,” a mixture of autobiography and sociology and comic improvisations, but his 14th monologue is a creative breakthrough from previous stories. It goes beyond the eccentric confines of “Monster in a Box,” which explored writer’s block, or the Hollywood-insider observations of “Swimming to Cambodia.”

“Gray’s Anatomy” is about the Big Fear: Death. How do we live with it? Do we fight it? Do we accept it? Is there a faith that a cynic like Gray can embrace? For the first time, Gray’s obsessions aren’t a freak show. We share his anatomy so we identify with his sadness. “Gray’s Anatomy” is his most accessible and his most romantic. It’s also the first one with a truly happy ending.

But that ending isn’t a Hollywood happily-ever-after fade out. Gray’s search for alternative therapies begins in an ophthalmologist (rhymes with monologuist) office, where he’s encouraged to get “a little macula scraping.”

Minor surgery? Gray is off-and-running for a cure, a cause, a clinic--anything to avoid that eye-scrape. Maybe the ailment surfaced because he writes in the first-person: “ . . . too much I, I, I, I, I!” Maybe it was caused by his novel “Impossible Vacation,” with the detached examination of his mother’s suicide?

Gray grew up in a Christian Science home, where “correct thinking” offered the only cure. His poignant memories of childhood underscore the desperation. His therapist, “an existential realist and graduate of Auschwitz,” offers little consolation: “All things are contingent and there is also chaos.” So Gray pursues radical nutritionists, a Native American sorceress, and “the Elvis Presley of psychic surgeons.”

He tries everything. Raw vegetables. Gestalt screams. Gives up alcohol and amino acids. Takes out a personal ad: “Let’s share puckers.” He even returns, briefly, to Christian Science prayer.

There is a lull when we assume that the piece’s climax is the eye operation. But Gray is a trickster, and the goal of his “Anatomy” is not physical but spiritual healing. “I believe in magic,” confesses the life-long ironist and cynic. “I believe that there has to be real magic if there are tricks in the world. And what is a trick if not an imitation of real magic?”

Gray’s a magician of words whose enchanted “Anatomy” is the best cure for what ails him--and us. See it.

* “Gray’s Anatomy,” Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, West Los Angeles. Tonight and Saturday at 8. (310) 825-2101. Campbell Hall, University of California Santa Barbara, April 27-28, 8 p.m.; Irvine Barclay Theatre, May 1, 3 p.m. Running time: 2 hours.