Spalding Gray's America, which seems to have the tacit approval of Gray's widow, Kathie Russo (who contributed photos), suffers from the absence of the voice of long-time girlfriend and collaborator Renûe Shafransky, the partner of the monologuist's most productive years. (The pair met in 1979, married in 1991, and separated messily when Russo bore Gray the first of their two children.) Demastes does identify Shafransky, Russo, and the director Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom Gray lived and worked early in his career, as "enablers and artistic advisers." And he accurately divides the monologuist into Gray the man on a cultural reconnaissance mission, Gray the artist who shapes the material, and Gray the performer acting his own naive, ironic persona: Huck Finn in pursuit of spiritualism and sex. But Demastes does not address the way in which, increasingly, the art cannibalized the life — until the moment in 2001 when a serious car crash led to the impairment and depression from which Gray never recovered. At least the performer had the forethought to compose his own droll, uncanny epitaph: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed, and Cannot Type."
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Theater
, Media, Books, David Hare, More
, Media, Books, David Hare, Nancy Carroll, Vanessa Redgrave, Huckleberry Finn, Eric Engel, Spalding Gray, Joan Didion, Louisiana State University, Less
