He’s Not Making This Up

Over the last two decades, Spalding Gray insisted more than once that he was on the brink of getting out of the monologue biz. Usually, he cited the simple fatigue, physical and mental, of turning them out one after another, taking the stage night after night, behind that lonely table, to perform “Swimming to Cambodia,” “Monster in a Box” and the like. But when he unleashed his last opus, in 1996, he feared that the end of his run might not be voluntary, that he might have committed monologue suicide with “It’s a Slippery Slope.”

“Slippery Slope,” for those who never saw it, was the monologue in which Gray offered a comic recitation of learning to ski and in the process confided a few skids in his personal soap opera--how he finally married his longtime live-in, writer-director Renee Shafransky, but continued an affair with a performing arts publicist, Kathie Russo, who promptly got pregnant. When she proved intent on having the baby, Gray reported, he rolled on the floor in despair over his plight.

The poor fellow was hissed in Chicago, sent hate mail after appearing at Lincoln Center here and found himself subject to suggestions from a few critics--women, in particular--that it might be time for audiences to rethink their attitude toward a creep capable of taking self-absorption to such a new level, even for him. “Brutal honesty is critical for any artist,” wrote The Times’ Laurie Winer, “but it’s hard to picture Gray writhing in agony . . . and not think, ‘Oh, just shut up.’ ”

Well, he hasn’t shut up.

Guess who’s back on stage in his flannel shirt, behind that table with the glass of water, a few notes and a bright yellow hot-dog-shaped boombox, offering a new dose of his psyche for paying customers?

That Gray is still at it is no surprise, really--he never followed through the other times he mused about chucking it all. But what may surprise many is the tone of his current work, which he will bring to UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall from Tuesday through Sunday, on its way to the Goodman Theater in Chicago in September, marking his 20-year anniversary as a monologuist.

In “Morning, Noon and Night,” Gray’s 16th monologue, the no-holds-barred observer of events on this planet comes across almost as . . . Dave Barry, the feel-good humorist from the domestic front.

“Morning” takes us through one day-in-the-life, Oct. 8, 1997. By then, Gray had split from Renee for good and set up house with Kathie and a trio of kids in tranquil Sag Harbor, out on Long Island. Their century-old farmhouse sheltered not only their first son from the affair, but their second son and Russo’s teenage daughter.

OK, the house is across from a cemetery and Gray can’t help but read the gravestones (“Prepare for Death/and Follow Me”), and he isn’t sure his 9-month-old likes this world (was that a “why this?” look he gave out of the womb?), and there’s a nuclear plant 15 miles upwind, in Connecticut.

That stuff aside, however, what we mostly get is Spalding Gray doing the station wagon bit. The edgy existentialist who for all these years has seemed so at home in hip, bohemian SoHo--reveling in the absurdities of hypochondria or Hollywood, or writer’s block or war--now has Power Rangers doing a water ballet in his bathtub. His stepdaughter plays the Spice Girls. The older son is afraid of the attic since he saw a “Chuckie” movie. The house is awash in the goofy questions kids ask. “Do aliens have armpits?” Even an attempt to share a few fooling-around moments with Kathie is foiled when they set off a Tickle Me Elmo doll in bed.

OK, again--they’re not married and he feels a little out of his element on the Island (“We’re not long for this place, Kathie!”). But the cute stories still drew plenty of approving “aaahhhhs” from the audience at a recent run-through at the State University of New York at Purchase, in the suburbs north of the city. Even the disembodied VOICE OF DEATH pipes in to encourage the slender 58-year-old Yankee on the stage to “Try enjoying life for a change.” At the end, the Gray-Russo family is dancing about to the cuddly sounds of Hanson.

What is going on here?

“It’s not conscious, but I think there’s a rhythm--you have a disturbing [monologue] and then you come back. I have 16 and it’s like hanging up paintings. The rhythms go from dark to light,” Gray says over breakfast back in his pre-family stamping ground, SoHo, where he maintains a loft.

“So ‘Morning, Noon and Night’ is more a celebration of the prosaic, the banal, the simplicity of a life that’s in relative harmony.”

He expected the reaction to his previous work, “Slippery Slope,” to be even more severe than it was.

“It was a watershed monologue,” he says, “the first in which I had ceased being the complete innocent victim, the good guy trying to seduce my audience and turn them into a mother. I was saying I’m now a grown-up man and I have a shadow in me and I’m a bastard, and I acted this way. . . . It was the riskiest one I’ve ever done. I still get the heebie-jeebies whenever I have to re-perform it.”

In the version of “Morning, Noon and Night” performed in Purchase--he is always tinkering, so it can change--Gray comments on the tricky intertwine between his art and life: “I live my life for a bit and take notes. I have to live a life to tell a life. I prefer just to tell a life--it’s much easier.”

In the past, he said he feared he lacked courage to live a real life, “to really sit in it, feel and be in it. . . . I treat life too much like theater. I frame it in a story and run from frame to frame.”

But his new monologue raises an issue different from the familiar one of the professional observer feeling distanced from the world. This material invites us to wonder how he will keep the edge in his work if his life--the source of his material--continues to approach “relative harmony.”

Will Gray feel tempted to “act out” if things are going too well?

“A lot of that was happening when I was living with Renee,” he confesses. “I started acting out in order to make a good story. I mean an example would be, in ‘Monster in a Box,’ when . . . Renee saw this book on AIDS and [I] got this spider bite and saw a mark that looks like [a symptom]. To some extent, I sat on the thing, I didn’t get checked out and it put Renee through enormous stress. You could say it was my lack of courage to get an AIDS test, but in a way it wasn’t. Because the longer I didn’t get it, the more dramatic the situation became. Until it finally turned into a show.”

That sort of thing is “over for me,” he swears. “I can’t do that with the children--they’re the ones who are acting out now. They become the central figures. My mother did that in front of me--either she acted crazy or was--and I’m not about to do it with them.”

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Gray says that his current creative consultant, New York ad man Paul Spencer, urged him to put more darkness in the new monologue.

“He said, ‘You’ve got to have more conflict in here for the audience. They’ve got to wonder if you’re going to stay with this family situation. You’ve got to have this outside thing--a woman you’re about to run away to, or a situation in California, or wherever your idealistic fantasy place is.’ ”

Gray’s answer? “It’s not happening now. I just think this is a different monologue. I’ve changed . . . I’ve cut down on the ironic stance. It’s more direct, heartfelt.

“You know, it happened to be a good day. I’m depicting a good day.”

If truth be told, he’s not overly worried that he will remain forever a “dressed-down Ozzie Nelson.” He senses--or fears--that this is a precarious state of affairs. He’s not sure what will spoil it, whether disease or the reactor, or Islamic jihad, or pesticides in our water or “the ultimate disharmony.”

Gray says, “All of the fears about future work are hypothetical. But I have thought about that. Now that I’ve moved out to Sag Harbor and I’m focusing on my family, what will I ever speak about or write about again? What will I ever be exposed to for an intense amount of time to give me an insight? I don’t want to turn my family into an Ozzie and Harriet sitcom, [always] doing an update.”

Though scheduled to perform the monologue into the year 2000, he’s starting to think of No. 17. He’s toyed with defense spending, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or perhaps an analytical deconstruction of his 20 years of monologues, examining “the character of Spalding Gray” from Eastern and Western points of view.

He’s open to a sitcom, too, as long as they don’t make him work too hard, like folks on “The Nanny,” on which he guested as a shrink.

“I’m just too lazy,” he says. “I’ve been very lucky with my work. I have a little bit, then down time. I’m with the children, I have sailing, skiing; my schedule is my own.”

If it sounds too cushy, Gray’s trying to convince himself not to fight it and welcome back the demons before their time.

“Sooner or later they’re going to happen on their own, so why rush it?” he notes. “When I was at my worst in L.A., acting out, a good friend of mine took me aside. ‘I see what you’re doing . . . making life very difficult. It already is. You shouldn’t compound it.’

“In a way, it’s a control thing. I was going to create my own hells before the real one gets to me. This monologue is about trying to let a lot of that go.”

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“MORNING, NOON AND NIGHT,” Spalding Gray, UCLA Schoenberg Hall, Dates: Tuesday through Saturday 8 p.m. and next Sunday at 2 p.m. Ends next Sunday. Price: $27. Phone: Ticketmaster (310) 825-2101 or online at https:www.cto.ucla.edu