Sunday, January 11, 2009

The Phoenix > Theater > Joan Didion on stage, Spalding Gray on the page:

And he accurately divides the monologuist into Gray the man on a cultural reconnaissance mission, Gray the artist who shapes the material, and Gray the performer acting his own naive, ironic persona: Huck Finn in pursuit of spiritualism and sex. But Demastes does not address the way in which, increasingly, the art cannibalized the life — until the moment in 2001 when a serious car crash led to the impairment and depression from which Gray never recovered. At least the performer had the forethought to compose his own droll, uncanny epitaph: "An American Original: Troubled, Inner-Directed, and Cannot Type."

11:52 PM