March 9, 2004

On Stage and in Life, A Comic Desperation

palding Gray didn't invent the monologue any more than Bob Dylan invented the folk song. But just as Mr. Dylan loosed on the world all manner of sincerely howling street singers, Mr. Gray opened the stage door for every actor with a penchant for public confession.

In self-scrutinizing works like "Terrors of Pleasure," "Swimming to Cambodia" and "It's a Slippery Slope," Mr. Gray was responsible more than anyone else for turning autobiography into an accepted theatrical form.

Found dead on Sunday after having been missing for nearly two months, he leaves behind him, at 62, the imprint of an innovator.

Mr. Gray, a man with prep-school good looks, a mane of gray hair and the harried mien of an Ivy League grad student late with his dissertation, was an actor trained in experimental theater who helped found the Wooster Group in the mid-1970's. That troupe was once considered, in the quaint locution of an earlier era, avant-garde.

But in time, his work edged into the theatrical mainstream. He wrote and performed his first monologue, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," in 1979. A decade later, his turn as the Stage Manager in a Tony-winning revival of "Our Town" matched his quintessentially New England wryness to the role of the quintessential New Englander. And in recent years his distinct profile had become more widely known through appearances on television and in Hollywood movies. In a 1994 film, "The Paper," for example, he played the editor of a newspaper very much like The New York Times, shrewdly sending up the paper's image with a wonderful performance of understated smugness.

But his main legacy is as a storytelling self-analyst. His monologues, which wove exotic adventures together with mundane personal tales, philosophical musings, painful admissions of embarrassing behavior and a general amazement at how often life's most far-fetched possibilities actually occur, were sometimes anchored in Everyman pursuits. "Terrors of Pleasure" was about owning a house. "It's a Slippery Slope" was about learning to ski. "Morning, Noon and Night" was about domesticity and fatherhood.

Sometimes they had more personally idiosyncratic narratives: "Monster in a Box" was about writing a novel. "Gray's Anatomy" delved into alternative medical treatments that Mr. Gray explored before submitting to an operation on his eye. The newest monologue, "Life Interrupted," which he was continuing to develop, was derived from an auto crash he barely survived while on vacation in Ireland with his family in 2001. And his most famous work, "Swimming to Cambodia," stemmed from his work as an actor on the film "The Killing Fields," on location in Thailand.

What all his work shared was an air of comic desperation, the amusement and fear that the knowledge that life is absurd can foster. The monologues were simply staged - Mr. Gray habitually performed seated at a card table, often in a plaid shirt, with only a glass of water and maybe a simple prop in front of him - and intoned with a back-porch informality that made it seem he was making up his stories as he went along. They gave off the deceptive, anyone-can-do-this aroma - like that of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, or the wrist shots of Wayne Gretzky, for that matter.

Unlike many of the performance artists who followed him, however, writing and acting out their life stories as if they were fables, Mr. Gray didn't hold himself up as representative of anything. His work spawned a steady parade of what I came to call the "How I Grew Up" shows: How I Grew Up Black in a White Suburb, How I Grew Up Fat, How I Grew Up Deaf, Poor, Addicted, Chicano, Homeless.

But Mr. Gray, a relentless worrywart who often spoke of being tormented by memories that wouldn't recede and who seemed to suffer from a compulsion for self-flagellation, seemed uninterested in staking a claim for expertise in a niche of our culture of personal hardship. And he never seemed to be taking credit for his own survival; rather, it seemed his storytelling was how he survived.

"Stories seem to fly to me and stick," he wrote in 1986 in an introduction to a collection of early monologues. But later he would confess to having run out of memories to plumb, and as he grew older, he began to seek out experiences that would enhance his monologues. In their creation, he was not above bending the sequences of events so that his life would, in the retelling, conform to the narrative structure he was building. Thus there was an increasing Möbius strip aspect- life imitates art imitates life - to his work.

Mr. Gray had suffered several bouts of severe depression and had tried or threatened to kill himself several times. He had been deeply distraught since the car accident in 2001. In an interview he gave to The New York Times in 1993, he spoke of his work as a way of redeeming his personal misery and acknowledged that he was particularly alert for the kind of pain that was severe enough to generate a good story.

"Yes, there's something in that," he said. "We're all going to experience misery, eventually. That's the bottom line. Being an amateur Buddhist, I'll go with that one, that life is suffering."