Spalding Rockwell Gray (June 5, 1941 – ca. January 11, 2004) was an American actor and writer. He is known for the autobiographical monologues that he wrote and performed for the theater in the 1980s and 1990s.
Notes from his piece: Swimming to Cambodia
The way in which Gray tells a story:
Liminal format.
A frequent shift in tone and atmosphere achieved by tone of voice, speed of speech and the use of dramatic pauses.
To some extent, when voicing the characters of those mentioned in the story, Gray adopts a different persona in order for the order to differentiate who is talking within the story being told such as the accent adopted by Gray when portraying Ivan.
‘First you suffer, then you synogue’ (Gray, 1987)
Changes the tone through lighting and his proximity to the microphone – close to the microphone changes his voice and allows him to deliver lines with more prominence. Uncanny use of abstract music allows audience to focus on more prominent part of the story. Once lines have been delivered with a sense of sincerity, Gray breaks the seriousness of the piece as the music also stops delivering lines such as ‘but of course I wasn’t going to tell her that’ evoking laughter from the audience.
Setting: He sits in front of an audience, with nothing but his notes, a microphone and the backdrop of a blue sky. This forces the audience to concentrate solely on the speech of the piece, rather than seeing the performance as an aesthetic piece.
Hand gestures also enables the telling of the story. When smoking marijuana, he mimes the action of taking ‘two tokes’ – this adds to the comedic factor of the story. The piece is also enhanced by the sound of a storm in the darker tones to the writing. The experience that Gray describes of being high is hilarious due to the state of panic in which this part of the story is told. Microphone effects such as echoing also enable Spalding to portray the way he is feeling at this point.
Also cuts to use of media in order for the story to progress. Humour is key theme throughout, when describing a director with which he worked, he says he was a combination of ‘Zorro, Jesus and Rasputin’ evoking laughter from the audience.
Some soliloquy elements – frank honesty of internal thoughts, eg. North Korea, ‘snapping on the way to by soup from the supermarket’ – when delivering this, audience are given a sense of dicomfort. Is Spalding’s bipolar disorder evident here? Autobiographical work, audience invited to laugh by Spalding at his irrationality and obsessive nature and off tangent subjects of which he speaks – e.g tattoos.
The pointing to Cambodia also breaks the story up before Gray talks on another subject.
POLITICALLY SATIRICAL
‘Operation Breakfast’
Mocks those in charge of this movement in the Cambodian area inviting the audience to laugh. This section ends with a sinister tone and the mention of genocide, allowing the audience to understand that they have been invited to laugh at a topic which is largely negative and frequently ignored in the media.
Dialect between Spalding and ‘Jack Daniels’ – no break in speech, change of tone and pitch in voice allows audience to distinguish who is talking at that given moments well as the change in camera angle every time the narrator changes.
Breaks story in order to directly address the audience.
Cited Texts
YouTube, (2014). Swimming to Cambodia – Spalding Gray. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JboW8AHE7A [Accessed 19 May. 2014].