Spalding Gray was an actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter and monologist. He was a storyteller to the core, and through exposing the emotional complexities of his personal life, created a new kind of organic improvisational theater.
Gray spun a story about his small part in Roland Joffé's film The Killing Fields into a breakthrough monologue and film, 1987's Swimming to Cambodia. Sitting at a table recounting his experiences before an audience, Gray's "down time" in Cambodia became a compelling story all its own. It was followed by more filmed monologues, Monster in a Box, Terrors of Pleasure and Gray's Anatomy.
Theater director Mark Russell described a typical monologue this way: "[Spalding] broke it all down to a table, a glass of water, a spiral notebook and a mic. Poor theatre—a man and an audience and a story. Spalding sitting at that table, speaking into the mic, calling forth the script of his life from his memory and those notebooks...Like all genius things, it was a simple idea turned on its axis to become absolutely fresh and radical."
Director Steven Soderbergh's new documentary, And Everything Is Going Fine, is a ghostly remembrance of Gray. Soderbergh earlier directed Gray in the little-seen King of the Hill (1993), and in the film version of Gray's monologue Gray's Anatomy in 1996.
Soderbergh, the only director ever to be Oscar-nominated for two films in the same year—Erin Brockovich and Traffic in 2000—alternates between smart mainstream entertainment (the Ocean's 11 films) and zero-budget art-house films (Bubble). His 1989 debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, managed to cross into both camps. This is squarely in the "art house" category; an innovative, affecting piece of work.
Spalding Gray, who struggled with bipolar disorder and depression much of his life, apparently leapt from the Staten Island ferry in 2004, drowning himself. In fact, he once said in an interview, "I was darkly convinced that at age 52 I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age. I was fantasizing that she was waiting for me on the other side of the grave.” His suicide—if it indeed was suicide—isn't mentioned in the documentary. Gray is a haunting—and haunted—presence.
Soderbergh has sculpted a first-person monologue from 25 years of footage Gray left behind, creating a fresh and radical, crazy-quilt monologue from beyond the grave. Just the way Spalding would want it.
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