The question of who killed Gray is, after all, a question about the truth, metaphoric or otherwise, of what happened, and as MacIvor makes clear, certainty about any situation or person is a moving target. We discover things about Gray like the time he took his son to see the 2003 Tim Burton film Big Fish (Helena Bonham Carter, who appeared in the film, also shows up in MacIvor’s play, but that’s a story for another time).
Spalding Gray’s brain injury.
So who did kill Spalding Gray, the American monologist who died in 2004? During surgery on his skull, a titanium plate was placed over the break after surgeons removed dozens of bone fragments from his frontal cortex.
While that’s hardly a stop-the-presses insight, the ways in which the playwright frames that target make for a fine 85 minutes.So who did kill Spalding Gray, the American monologist who died in 2004? The identity of the corpse, found in the river the next Sunday, March 7, was confirmed the following day. Prevented from exercising his own “peoplehood,” the Majority artist looks for substitutes in minority racism, in exotic religions and Oriental cults, in harebrained exploits of civil disobedience, in African and pre-Columbian art, psychoanalysis, narcotics, and homosexuality.A “cerebral, restless youth,” Gray at first aspired to become a novelist, but subsequently focused on the theater. By Oliver Sack s. April 20, 2015. If you don't see it please check your junk folder.We also spend time with Gray. But again, does it matter what’s true and what’s not if it feels true?The show, directed by Daniel Brooks, is a skein of stories and enacted pieces that link MacIvor, Gray and Howard in progressively inextricable fashion.Principal among those issues is truth. Turns out the question is very much necessary according to Daniel MacIvor’s disarmingly idiosyncratic solo show about himself, Gray, a guy called Howard, and some pretty big issues including death, self-forgiveness and truth.At the Great Canadian Theatre CompanyTrying to follow this path of truth, untruth and whatever lies between, the mind after a while reels, kind of like when you start imagining multiple universes. Considering that he committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in New York, you’d think the question unnecessary.© 2020 Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. Of Nordics and Anglo-Saxons? Then this unimportant actor and his suicide is nothing to lament. When MacIvor plays him, he sits at a table with a spiral-bound notebook, a glass of water and a microphone as Gray himself used to do when he performed. … It’s true that physical injuries suffered in a near-fatal 2001 automobile accident on a treacherous, narrow lane in rural Ireland triggered his devastating final depression, but it’s also true that Spalding Gray was badly mixed up long before the occurrence of that tragic event.Enough.
After leaving Emerson College, Gray tried to break into regional theater in Houston, Texas. In one especially moving moment, we visit an incident involving Howard and his young son that reminds us of how powerfully MacIvor, author of plays like The Best Brothers and Communion, can write about family. Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald spent many of their most creative years abroad and returned to gypsy-like, coast-to-coast peregrinations and an early death that was either helped along or brought about by alcohol poisoning. From roles as serious as Richard Burton’s were – e.g. All engines full-stop. Eliot became a British citizen, Robert Frost was first discovered and published while living in England.
The process took three sessions, the accounting of which he weaves throughout the play, and occurred at the same time that Gray killed himself. BIPOLAR SELF-ABSORBED dyslexic high-IQ depressed WASP actor Spalding Gray (pictured; 1941-2004) committed suicide in the freezing cold of January 2004 by jumping into the East River from the Staten Island Ferry. And does it matter what he believes when the entire play rings with some indefinable but undeniable larger truth?There was an error, please provide a valid email address.Gray’s monologues, MacIvor warns, are untruth masking as the truth. Pound, who probably exercised more influence on modern literature than any other poet, settled down in Rapallo, and dabbled in European right-wing politics.
Related in the convivial storytelling style of which MacIvor is a master, the tale is very funny, a bit disquieting and ultimately ambiguous: does MacIvor believe he harboured an entity or not?