STAGE REVIEW : Gray Matter That Leads to Discovery

“In the beginning there was the word,” wrote an unknown author many millenia ago.

“In the beginning, I’m never sure what I’m talking about,” writes a contemporary author in the program for his new monologue: “L.A. the Other . . . Building a Monologue,” now at Taper, Too.

This author is Spalding Gray, who can be counted on for truthfulness and who has elevated the science of the autobiographical monologue to an art--or vice versa. Whichever way you look at or listen to it, this fledgling work-in-progress--the 13th in a distinguished line of idiosyncratic personal ramblings--promises to be every bit as fascinating as the others. In fact, it already is.

Gray claims to speak spontaneously, from notes rather than a script. That in itself is astonishing (it all flows so effortlessly), but methodology is not really the point here. What Gray makes worth our while, worth our act of surrender to the story, is his own journey through it . The theater may be dark, but this hour in it is enlightening. And one has to wonder why.

After all, in this latest effort--the first monologue this antsy New Englander has developed in his recently adopted Los Angeles--we travel all over the map, literally as well as figuratively. Sitting demurely at a table, nearly motionless, Gray describes what in most cases would be a simple thing: his attempt to take a vacation alone.

What could be simpler?

Except that things happen to Gray. He is event-prone the way other people are accident-prone. And the eventfulness that surrounds him is usually unusual.

“I think it all started in 1985, in Adelaide, Australia . . . ,” he begins uneventfully enough. But from there we’re off--to Bali, to Brooklyn (not necessarily in that order), to San Miguel de Allende, to Las Vegas, to New England, to the windmills of his mind. . . .

We listen willingly because Gray is nakedly candid, because he’s vulnerable, because he meets people with fascinating names (some Dickensian, like Caldonia and Eli Shivers; some Latin, like double-threat mother-and-daughter Enrita and Cita; some awesome, like that street kid Peace Babba Aquarius) and because, whether they were or not, he makes these people interesting. But we also listen for a deeper reason.

Finely woven into this National Geographic sampler is a moving and unexpected side trip. Concealed among the more lighthearted excursions are Gray’s inner travels through his mother’s insanity and suicide. He makes us glimpse her for the enchanting and valiant woman she must have been and generously allows us to measure the keenness of his loss by our own yardsticks.

This is not an exorcism exactly--Gray in this portion of the account is a little too circumspect for that--but it is a pilgrimage wrapped inside a vacation.

Here “Building a Monologue” precisely intersects with “Time Flies When You’re Alive,” now at the Tiffany Theatre--a hair-raising, life-affirming account by Paul Linke (latter-day monologuist come only recently to the ring) who tells us all about losing his young wife to cancer.

In fact, Gray’s eloquent synthesis of the monologuist’s art at the conclusion of his program note, goes a long way toward explaining why, as invited interlopers, we’re so mesmerized by this private view of someone else’s grief and other (mis)adventures. I defy anyone to explain it better. And since this man of words is so consistently lucid, it seems only fitting to let him have the last ones:

“I know there are certain stories,” he writes, “that through repeated telling, begin both to give me pleasure and, at the same time, to help me make sense of my life. I talk to you both to entertain you and to find out what I think and feel about the way things are. Like all creative acts, it starts as something purely personal and works when it reaches something personal in you.”

Performances at 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 2:30, until Jan. 31. Tickets: $15; (213) 972-7337).