SHADES OF GRAY.(Spalding Gray)

Spalding Gray, a naked man who wore chinos and long-sleeved shirts, usually with the cuffs rolled up, last appeared onstage in New York in December, 2003. He once told an interviewer, "When people say to me, 'What do you do?' I say, 'I tell stories from my life.' They say, 'You must have a very interesting life.' 'No,' I say. 'But I tell it well.' " His standard props included--along with a table, a chair, and a glass of water--a spiral notebook. Often, his monologues had paradoxical emotional and sensory effects upon audiences. Not the least of these was that he possessed such an immediate, arresting presence--he lived in quest of what he called "perfect moments"--that it was possible to forget that his meandering delivery depended upon words he had committed to the page with obsessive precision. Was he principally a writer or an actor? In one of his unpublished journals, he described himself as a "collagist taking bits and scraps from the growing heap of my life."

After Gray's suicide--he drowned at sixty-two, probably by jumping from the Staten Island Ferry, in January, 2004, two and a half years after being severely injured in an automobile accident--his literary estate included a number of unpublished journals. (Gray never learned to type and was also dyslexic.) Almost two years later, his widow, Kathleen Russo, a theatrical agent, and Lucy Sexton, a performance artist, spent a weekend in Sag Harbor, where Gray and Russo lived with their three children, and began reading his diaries. (From 1969: "I often feel lost in the essence of a day, the mild wind and easy clouds, the graceful easy white ass of day, that I want nothing more than to become a leaf, not to write about it, but to do nothing, to be taken in and bathed.") The result, originally presented at P.S. 122 last June, to celebrate Gray's sixty-fifth birthday, was a four-night run of selected readings from his journals and monologues. This week, a refined version of "Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell" opens at the ...