Swimming to Cambodia (16 page)

So Spalding Gray got a minor role in
The Killing Fields
, a movie about the recent—one could say continuing—history of Cambodia. It was shot in Thailand, next door to where it originally happened (continues to happen), and in Hollywood, where everything pretends (or aspires) to happen. And he made a monologue about Cambodia, Thailand, Hollywood—and Spalding Gray.

As remarkable as they all are, the previous monologues now seem like test flights for the virtuosic swoops and dives of the Cambodia pieces. In them, those poles by which what we call reality are measured tumble over one another like dice in a crap shoot: fiction over history, madness over sanity, microcosm over macrocosm, dream over reality. A sailor likes blue-flake cocaine, kinky threesomes and the nuclear detonator to
which he is handcuffed; a President watches George C. Scott in Patton and tells a gathering of war protesters how travel improves the mind; a corporate vice president reads
An Actor Prepares
. A small country of exquisite people—an innocent paradise—transforms itself into hell-on-earth, stirred to genocidal frenzy by Mao, Rousseau and B-52s. But, are those slaughtered peasants or day-players cosmetized with stage blood and chicken giblets? Are those burning villages or burning tires set out by the special-effects crew? Is this history or just another take? Through this landscape in which everything threatens to become something else, Gray wanders, the essential white-bread WASP, skirting the shore to avoid the sharks, looking for an agent, afraid he will miss the fun, staying too long at the party, asking simple questions, getting terrifying answers, searching for the Perfect Moment.

This is a recording. For the first time, Gray's odyssey has been taken down. What in his monologues has always seemed to be writing, hovering just above the little table from which he performs, is now written. We lose the wry, desultory, curious living presence of a master storyteller. But we gain the opportunity to make our own replays again and again, and to take the measure of an achievement that seems to grow with each encounter—perhaps even to epic proportions.

Swimming to Cambodia
is copyright © 1985 by Spalding Gray

 

Swimming to Cambodia
is published by
Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 Eighth Avenue,
24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156.

 

“About the Author” is copyright © 2005 by Roger Rosenblatt
The Afterword is copyright © 1985 by James Leverett

 

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Acknowledgments

Poem extract on page 71 from “Of Mere Being,” in
The Palm at the End of the Mind
by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; used by permission of the publisher. Quotations on page 125 from
The Cocktail
Party by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1950, 1978 by Esme Valerie Eliot; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (U.S.) and Faber and Faber (Great Britain); used by permission of the publishers. Lines on page 44 from “Killing Me Softly with His Song” used by permission of Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, copyright © 1972 by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel. All rights reserved.

 

This publication is made possible in part with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

 

TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by
Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive,
St. Paul, MN 55114.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gray, Spalding, 1941-2004
Swimming to Cambodia.
1. Gray, Spalding, 1941-2004—Journeys—Cambodia. 2. Cambodia—
Description and travel—1975- 3. Moving-picture actors and
actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Killing fields.

eISBN : 978-1-559-36637-3

I. Title.
PN2287 .G6759A.43'028'0924 [B] 85-20875

 

 

New Edition, February 2005