STAGE REVIEW : Spalding Gray Takes a Chance With Chatting

Spalding Gray, who usually talks about himself (as in “Swimming to Cambodia”), will be in residence at Taper, Too for the next couple of weeks talking to other people.

There will be a new batch of them every night. The idea of “L.A. The Other, Conversations With . . . “ is to have Gray sit down with local people who aren’t famous and who don’t have a movie to plug, the object being to get a handle on the real Los Angeles, as opposed to “Hollywood.”

The difficulties of this were illustrated Wednesday night when Gray’s first guest, a young surfer named Tom Kabbash, mentioned that he had just returned from a shoot. And his last guest, Marie Tolbert, did have a book to plug.

Still, each turned out to be a certifiably real person. Indeed, Gray’s four L.A. guests (including Raymond Hirai, 98, and Malen Chhuon, 18) were so solidly themselves that it made Gray a little nervous.

Why weren’t they afraid of earthquakes, of sharks, of people who claimed to be from other planets, of the boundlessness of the Southern California experience? Gray wasn’t used to these things yet, and he had been here since March.

Well, they just weren’t, that’s all. Kabbash talked about the importance of relaxing when going under the wave, so that your adrenaline flow didn’t shorten your breath supply.

Hirai demonstrated the wisdom of going with your opponent’s blow in karate, Gray playing the adversary. He then assured Gray that, from his palm, Gray would live to be 90.

Chhuon said that nothing in California could scare her as much as what she had gone through in Cambodia before escaping with her family. If she survived that, she could survive anything.

Tolbert said that a person had to be positive, even about the court system. She had waged a successful fight to keep her son from the electric chair, and that was what her book, “Pontiac,” was about.

Like most talk-show hosts, Gray hadn’t read the book. Unlike them, he admitted it. He had meant to read it, he said, but he had lost it. It was probably under something at home.

He is not, perhaps, the most organized man in the world, but that kept the conversation unstressed and for the most part informative. People talking about themselves almost always are informative, and Gray has a shrewd sense of when to go too far--when to ask the question that perhaps you wouldn’t ask in polite conversation.

He also knows when not to ask it, and he was nicely gentle with Chhuon, whose most eloquent answers came from her eyes. Tom Kabbash seemed astonishingly poised for a 20-year-old (not brash, just poised), but he had a rather endearing problem of where to put his feet.

Hirai, at 98, had it all together. We learned that he lives in a Skid Row hotel that is neat as a pin; that he goes to the track every day and considers it bad luck to win too much; that he was interned at Manzanar during World War II (a link with Chhuon, who was in a Thailand camp); that his old friend Harry Houdini had a split personality, and a dozen more things one wouldn’t have expected.

“Nobody’s fingerprints are alike,” he said, examining Gray’s palm. No two people’s stories are alike either. At its best, the evening showed that everybody has a story, if he or she can be drawn out.

At its worst . . . well, the dullest patch came when Gray And Tolbert got to comparing the evening’s format with that of “Oprah Winfrey.” But even that was revealing. When Americans don’t know what to talk about, they talk about television.

“L.A. The Other, Conversations With . . .” plays at 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m., until Jan. 17. Tickets $15; (213) 972-7337. A companion piece-in-progress, “L.A. The Other, Building a Monologue,” follows Jan. 19-31.