Tucson Weekly: Word Play (April 2

Once Again, Spalding Gray Confesses Everything.
By Margaret Regan
SPALDING GRAY, THE wholly original monologist, neurotic raconteur and self-absorbed "New Wave Mark Twain," this week brings to the UA his traveling one-man show about skiing and sexual catastrophe. Seated as usual behind a simple table, Gray will conjure up Colorado snowscapes and New York heartbreaks in It's a Slippery Slope.
Gray first developed his curious tell-all monologue form in late '70s, early '80s New York, during the delirious days of the pre-AIDS, high punk East Village art scene, when he was part of the avant-garde theatre troupe Wooster Group. ("In those days people actually went to bed together on the first date," he says in It's a Slippery Slope.) His new genre celebrated not only his genius for talking, and talking and talking some more, but his gift for making the most intimate details on his own life riveting--and funny--to total strangers.
Review In his first-ever monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14, there's a line that sums up his whole M.O. Gray was detailing his hesitation about performing a naughty sexual act during a raunchy European vacation. Speaking to a packed audience in New York's Soho, he remembered, "But then I said to myself, 'Who would ever know?' "
It was a characteristic Spaldian irony that nicely sums up the man's working method: Tell all, but tell it well, and tell it with irony. Gray has kept it up in a whole series of monologues, most notably in Swimming to Cambodia, a profound work that won an Obie theatre award and was made into a great movie by Jonathan Demme. It's a Slippery Slope confines itself to more personal terrain, though Arizonans will relish its references to the sunshine state, where Gray first tried skiing. ("The Grand Canyon is really an upside-down mountain! It's a very large, inverted mountain. It's a depression, it's a very big depression. And as I went farther down into it I became more and more depressed.")
The monologue juxtaposes the image of a perennial klutz learning to ski at mid-life on the gorgeous mountains of Colorado, learning to "dance in the light," with the adulterer who, off the mountain, is playing kamikaze with his emotional life. Published in book form by The Noonday Press/Farrar Straus and Giroux, It's a Slippery Slope is a discomfiting combination of lyrical joy, delicious irony and not-at-all-funny mea culpas about Gray's destruction of his longtime relationship with his wife and creative partner.
His public confession of his misdeeds may be a kind of self-punishment, but you can't help noticing that he gets a double benefit from his crimes: new material for a monologue and a baby son he adores. His words about his unexpected passion for his child almost make you forgive his self-indulgence: "I looked down into his eyes and fell in. I did not expect the gaze that came back, it was absolutely forever...Oh, yes, till death do us part."
Spalding Gray performs It's a Slippery Slope at the UA Gallagher Theater, in the southeast corner of the Student Union. Shows are at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 2, and 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4. Tickets are $25 general, half price for students with ID and children 18 and under. Faculty and staff get 15 percent off. The show is the final entry in the UApresents Street Noise series this season. Tickets are available at Dillard's (1-800-638-4253) andthe Centennial Hall box office (621-3341).

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