You didn't have to break bread with Spalding Gray, or even accost him in an elevator to feel you'd met him. All you had to do was buy a ticket, and for the price of admission he'd do the work. Tell you the most astonishingly revealing things, harsh things about himself, things most people don't like to dwell on.

In one of his monologues, the first-person form that made him famous, he told a terrible story on himself, about his betrayal of his first wife and the child he'd conceived with the woman who would become his second. It was hard to listen to, and fascinating to listen to. Sitting, as was his preference in performance, at a pine desk, attired in a plaid flannel shirt like an aging L.L. Bean catalog model, his spiral notebook opened before him, he read aloud about his caddish behavior in an actor's rich tones.

It was his compulsion to speak the truth about himself, to be his own witness and prosecutor. He called himself a poetic journalist, and the rhyme scheme went something like: Me-Me-Me-Me-Me.

Best known for "Swimming to Cambodia," the solo piece that was based on his experiences acting in the 1984 drama "The Killing Fields," Gray performed more than a dozen major monologues over the years, including the highly praised "Gray's Anatomy," "Monster in a Box" and "Morning, Noon and Night."

Some people were put off by what they viewed as Gray's bottomless self-absorption, but others recognized his trailblazing style for its eccentric beauty. Gray's gift was indeed poetic: confession as art. And it was a distinctive kind of performance that spawned an entire genre. He's the father of autobiography under the footlights.

You might think that Gray's ability to render cold-eyed assessments of himself, that the knowledge of his bouts with depression and the history of suicide in his family - his mother killed herself at 52 - would have been preparation for the news of his sad ending. He disappeared two months ago, after taking the Staten Island Ferry. His body was pulled from the East River on Sunday and identified Monday. He would have been 63 in June.

But this wet, frigid death in New York Harbor feels so much like the wrong exit. The despair that engulfed him after a disfiguring car accident in 2001 must have been overwhelming. In the midst of his recovery, he began doing a new monologue in out-of-the-way venues, and the show could be both intriguing and excruciating.

Storytelling is an act of belief, and it was the positive energy in Gray's efforts to report sincerely on his life that won him an affectionate following.

"There is nothing, no other life of mine to compare this to," he said in his 1998 show, "Morning, Noon and Night." "There is no way of knowing what the right decision in life is if you have no other life to compare it to. We are like blind people backing into the future, living for better, or for worse."

From the March 10, 2004 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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