IN MEMORIAM Spalding Gray, 1941–2004 BY CAROLYN CLAY

Spalding Gray lived his life with one eye on his navel and the other on the Reaper. An entertainer coasting on ironic seas and ever examining his own paddle and bail-bucket, he began his very first monologue, the 1979 Sex and Death to the Age 14, recounting his mother’s joyful reaction to Hiroshima and the demise of the family cocker spaniel. He ended his last, the exuberant 1999 paean to the quirky joys of family life Morning, Noon and Night, with a mordant fantasy that his own infuriatingly unpredictable end would deprive him of the exquisite pleasure of holding his son. In the end, the man who made a living and amassed a following by talking about himself cheated the specter with the scythe of his big Gotcha, and took his own life by plunging off the Staten Island ferry. He had been reported missing on January 12 after suffering, since a 2001 car crash in Ireland, from various physical ills and depression. His death was confirmed when his body was discovered in the East River on Sunday, March 7.

The irony is that Gray was not, like Eugene O’Neill’s Edmund Tyrone, "a little in love with death." He was curious about it, as he was curious about everything, even a little fixated, as he tended to be. And he told us about it in a series of 16 monologues, performed from notes, over the course of two decades. In the process, telling the story of the life he at once plunged into and hovered above (an "inner witness"), Gray became the voice of our collective anxiety, turning personal adventures — such as playing a bit part in The Killing Fields and discovering what Philip Roth might call the American stain, searching for the perfect eye surgeon, or suffering a midlife crisis while learning to ski — into receptacles for the universal.

Three of Gray’s oft-hilarious yet trenchant monologues were made into films: Jonathan Demme’s 1987 Swimming to Cambodia, Nick Broomfield’s 1992 Monster in a Box, and Steven Soderbergh’s 1996 Gray’s Anatomy. But those of us in New England, whence Rhode Islander and Emerson College grad Gray hailed, saw and heard it all, from Sex and Death and its companion piece Booze, Cars and College Girls to the peripatetic 47 Beds to Gray’s account of the shows he was in while an ordinary actor, culled in no particular order from index cards and titled A Personal History of the American Theater. I have delighted in the plaid-shirted confessor holding forth from behind his little wooden table, taking calibrated sips of water as he builds the blocks of his quests, observations, and neuroses into an ever-more-artful account of his existential journey, in venues ranging from the Cutler Majestic and Brattle Theatres to a classroom at Northeastern where, in the early days, he tried out a new work for about 35 of us. Dancing with him journalist-to-artist over the years was disarming because, always the unarmored raconteur, he was as candid in interviews as in monologues.

By his own account, Gray hardly expected to become the Woody Allenish WASP voice of a generation. Dyslexic and a bomber of boys’ toilets (though acerbic and intelligent), he was shipped off to a boarding school before studying theater at Emerson. He ended up in New York living with the experimental director Elizabeth LeCompte, with whom he helped co-found the experimental giant the Wooster Group, where in the 1970s the ensemble trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island centered on Gray’s life and, in particular, on his mother’s suicide at 52 — an event that filters through the body of his work. From the last play in the trilogy, he copped the wooden table, and he was off on his solo career as — in his words, from Terrors of Pleasure: The House — "a Huck Finn–Candide type who gets into all these weird situations." Pessimistic yet uncannily open to anything, from an Indian sweat lodge to the whorehouses of Bangkok, he says (in Monster in a Box), "I’m kind of a control freak and I like to create my own hells before the real ones get to me. I kind of like to beat hell to hell."

There is a crazy, heart-lifting scene near the end of Morning, Noon and Night, Gray’s last perfected monologue, a sort of hip homage to Our Town (in the Thornton Wilder version of which Gray played the Stage Manager on Broadway in 1988), in which he records in detail a single fall day in the life of his unexpectedly acquired family in 1997. Having treated of such diverse material as Phoebe Niles’s tombstone in the cemetery of Sag Harbor (to which the inveterate New Yorker had moved), The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the film The Nutty Professor, and the pleasures of a stolen quickie, Gray recounts an after-supper scene in which the whole family — he, partner Kathie Russo, her daughter Marissa, their sons Forrest and Theo, the last a babe in arms — cannot resist the rhythms of Chumbawamba.

In the end, the dance of life could not conquer Gray’s morose obsessions, from which, heroically, he mined comedy. His loss is a real tragedy for Kathie and their sons, now 11 and seven. But we, too, are among the bereaved: we won’t get to hear the next chapter.