Swimming to fatherhood

>> Has Spalding Gray blunted the cutting edge of talk theatre?

by JULIET WATERS

A decade and a half ago when Spalding Gray published Swimming to Cambodia, few people would have predicted a book like Morning, Noon and Night. Gray is best known for re-inventing the baby boom storytelling and memoir craze of the '90s. And lesser known for his roles in The Killing Fields and Fran Drescher's therapist on The Nanny. Spinning narcissism into gold, he's turned an incredible talent for collecting the strange and intimate details of his life into a career. Though he's also the one to blame for an epidemic of spoken word monologues best parodied in the "Jerry Seinfeld Is the Devil" episode.

Brutal self-awareness and unsentimental honesty has kept him on the cutting edge of the much-overkilled new genre of talk theatre. But a book-length essay on a day in the life of a new parent (Gray is 56, so a fairly old new parent) is about as blunt as the edge could possibly get. Is there a baby boomer left that hasn't written about this?

If Gray is to theatre and literature what Woody Allen has been to comedy and film, then Morning, Noon and Night is something akin to Woody coming out with a new movie starring himself and Julia Roberts. How can one avoid getting smarmy over the joyous subject of one's infant son and spunky, younger girlfriend? But if anyone can find the exquisite psychic malaise in this situation it's Gray. For is it not true that the more blissful and serendipitous your life, the more terrified you will be of death? Thus, the opening quote from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, a poem brilliantly suited to funerals.

Gray's an accidental father. His girlfriend, Kathie, had his first son, Forrest, just after he got married to another woman, Ramona (this complicated affair is the subject of his previous book, It's a Slippery Slope). He did eventually leave his bride, to live with Kathie, Forrest and her daughter Marissa from a previous relationship. When Kathie became pregnant again, soon after they moved into a 19th-century house in Sag Harbour, Gray was reluctant to have the second child.

His father had three sons, "and I had seen what that had done to him." He thought waiting to decide after Kathie's amniocentesis might be a fair compromise, but she would only compromise with an early abortion. Then, after a breakthrough in therapy where he realized he was "too old to opt for death," he decided he'd welcome the new child, "and suffer the consequences."

Though the greatest portion of sympathy must be reserved for whichever woman he's involved with, one can't help feeling something for Michael, Marissa's natural father. Once a big fan of Gray's, he introduced Kathie to Swimming To Cambodia. Impressed, she booked him for a performance space she was in charge of, and the rest is Gray's story.

"When he [Micheal] calls on the phone I can hear so much rage and anger in his voice. You can hear all that rage in his throat, and when I answer, I always feel like asking: 'Michael what are you so angry about?' But I don't. I don't say anything of the sort. I play mister nice polite guy." Though not mister nice polite guy enough to accuse him, if not on the phone then in print, of plotting to turn his stepdaughter against him, even if Gray offers no facts to back this up. Woe to anyone who ends up a minor character in a Gray monologue.

But it's the minor characters in Morning, Noon and Night that entirely save it from sentimentality. Ice cool Marissa, the Bette Davis of adolescent drama queens. And especially Forrest, Gray's five-year-old son, and in many ways his Mini-Me. Whether Forrest is asking how flies celebrate, or telling his father, "I'm so glad you met Mom or I would have been stuck inside a sperm forever," Forrest maintains the interest in the peculiar details of life that will ensure Gray's survival long after the trend of fin de siecle memoir has passed. :

Morning, Noon and Night by Spalding Gray, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, hc, 152pp, $28.95