Wednesday night, the monologist Spalding Gray was to have opened at the Goodman Theatre, offering a reprise of his classic one-person show “Swimming to Cambodia.” There would have been a review on this page. But last week, the Goodman announced that the performance had been canceled because of “last-minute difficulties with scheduling.”
More accurately, Gray canceled the Goodman engagement because he felt like he needed to get home to New England to continue with his acupuncture treatments for a devastating car accident.
To celebrate his 60th birthday last June, Gray went to Ireland with his family. The trip included his second wife, Kathie, and their children Forest and Theo. And so on June 22, 2001, Gray found himself seated in the rear of a rental car in County Westmeath.
At one of the many junctures in rural Ireland where a two-lane road becomes, without warning, a single-lane operation, Gray’s car (which was driven by his wife) came to a judicious halt. At that point, a black van came around the corner and hit the car head on.
Its engine came into the cab of Gray’s rental car. Gray’s skull was fractured, his leg bent backward, and his hip broken, requiring a plate in his hip.
Others in the car were less seriously hurt.
Traction inaction
“It took an hour for the stupid ambulance to arrive,” Gray said, after being tracked down at his home on Long Island last week. “I ended up in one of those horrible Irish country hospitals and they wanted to leave me there in traction for six weeks.”
To get him out of there, it required some local awareness that, well, Spalding Gray, was in situ.
“Kathie called the Irish Arts Council,” Gray said. “She persuaded them to help move me to a hospital in Dublin.”
Now in Gray’s singularly self-revelatory universe, seemingly devastating life events like these are invariably fodder for new monologues. When he bought a crummy cabin in Catskills, he wrote about it in “Terrors of Pleasure.” And when Gray’s then-girlfriend Kathie became pregnant, the reaction of Gray’s first wife, Rene Shrinasky, was a part of “Monster in a Box,” a piece that also dealt with the death of Gray’s father, and his therapist, in the same week that he left his wife of 14 years for a pregnant younger woman.
He has written about his medical problems before. When his left eye began to deteriorate in the early 1990s, Gray’s sight-threatening encounters with a motley crew of faith healers and quacks became “Gray’s Anatomy.”
So it should be no surprise that, on this recent short tour, Gray has been talking about his accident for a few minutes prior to launching into “Cambodia.” But by his own admission, it has not been working very well.
“After talking about Ireland for a few minutes so the audience knows what’s going on, I’ve been having a problem connecting with the material in `Cambodia,'” he said with a heavy sigh. “At least that’s what the critics have been saying.”
Difficult to talk about
So when Gray next returns to Chicago — which, he says, will be soon — it’s a pretty good bet he’ll be talking about Irish hospitals, fractured skulls and malevolent drivers of black vans. Or maybe not. One senses he has finally bumped up against a reality so painful, it’s actually hard to talk about.
“This accident,” he says, “was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me. It’s very difficult to turn into a monologue. And I haven’t yet dealt with my anger at that driver. I have never had the chance to confront him.”
Furthermore, recent events have conspired against any show with so much as a hint of self-pity (which has long been one of Gray’s favorite theatrical devices).
“I keep getting intimidated by Sept. 11,” Gray says, “and feeling like I don’t have the right to sing the blues.”
But if you’re Spalding Gray, you really don’t have any choice. The events in his otherworldly life have been public fodder for a quarter of a century. Since Gray has set us up to expect biography not fiction, today’s pain has to be Wednesday’s show. Otherwise, there would be nothing for him to say.
So, full monologue on the agonizing Irish affair, coming soon to a theater near us?
There’s a pause.
“This has consumed me. So I guess it will have to be my next show in Chicago.”