And then there's the going, gently or not, into the good night. Toward the end, Lyman's understated recitation of "To be or not to be" has as many echoes of Beckett's contemplation of meaningless as it does of Shakespeare's almost existential call to action.
Throughout the 90 minutes, Fugard makes subtle connections between the Sophoclean and Shakespearean themes in André's performances and his own personal history. It never seems as if he were showing off, however. His playfulness with the language also keeps didacticism at bay. Like André, Fugard has learned to do less with more.
THE RANDOM CARUSO: This one has the charismatic Robert Pemberton as the sleazeball actor and not much else. |
The question about Fugard has always been whether his relevance would survive the end of apartheid. The question about Spalding Gray has become whether his work will survive the tragedy of his suicide in 2004.
Thanks to his widow, Kathleen Russo, the answer is a resounding yes. Russo — we know her as Kathie from his last few monologues — brought the Off Broadway hit Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell to the Institute of Contemporary Art last week with a quartet of like-minded authors and actors who at each performance were joined by a guest reader. Russo conceived the show; Lucy Sexton directed it.
Gray had been in the first rank of theatrical writers at the turn of the millennium. He was often called self-absorbed; some even blamed his suicide on that inability to get out of himself. But it was really his quest to go so far within himself that yielded the insights into sex and drugs, independence and fatherhood, and ultimately life and death, that made him such a great writer and that made his almost annual visits to Boston and Cambridge a must.
His final visit, in 2002, featured a lackluster reading of his most famous work, Swimming to Cambodia. He was severely depressed from the automobile accident in Ireland that had left him in great pain, but you speculated, nevertheless, that if he couldn't sell his previous work, what hope did anyone else have?
And as the four Grays — Josh Lefkowitz, Ain Gordon, David Cale and Alina Troyana — begin the performance, all one's worst fears seem realized. But it takes only a few minutes to get over the idea that it isn't the same as when he performed them himself. The quartet make every journal entry, letter, and monologue excerpt echo with Gray's genius for seeking, and often finding, life's perfect moments.
That this is accomplished with a variety of accents and acting styles is a tribute not only to Gray's writing but to Russo's conception and Sexton's smooth, savvy direction. If I started out thinking, "Nobody reads Spalding like Spalding," by the time former Providence mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci came out on stage Saturday night, I was ready to get up and say, "We are all Spalding Gray." Cianci doesn't have the acting abilities of the other four, but his readings of Gray watching a young boy vomit during a performance of Our Town and of his meeting Richard Nixon at an eye-doctor appointment were the funniest of the night.
