 Good evening, welcome to the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. My name is Anke Udel. I'm Associate Director of Programs here at the Center. It's my pleasure to welcome you to a very special evening. We have all been looking forward to this very much. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Center's mission, which is to bridge academia and the professional theater. And part of that mission also is to honor, to remember great theater artists, artists that changed and challenged the theater of their times. Without a doubt, Baldingray belongs to this group. His work had a big impact when he was creating it on the theater scene and continues to have a big impact and influence on current and future, for sure, generations of theater makers. It has been a great day so far. We started early in the morning with screenings of films, documentations about Baldingray, documentations of his work. And tonight we will have discussions and reading and we will show some film clips as well. So before we start, I would like to introduce and also thank our panel, Kathleen Russo, who is Baldingray's wife and Lucy Sexton, who helped to put this event together here with us. And also Ken Copeland, the director of the film Balmstake Road, which we presented today, as well as Clay Harpers, who is he in the audience today? I don't know. He was here earlier. He was here. From the Worcester group, he was really, he basically helped us get the rights to present Balmstake Road. So please turn off your cell phones and we will start with the trailer of Steven Soderbergh's film and everything is going fine. So we'll basically hand the mic to Baldingray himself first. Maybe I should just tell you some of the facts as I remember them. They got very disillusioned with theater and the lack of adventure and experimentation. I just did a story of my day as fast as I could speak of. The choice was running around with me. Who wrote it? I sat down at the table in front of whoever came. I was worried about maybe about 15 or 16 people now. And it was everything I could remember about sex and death until the age of 14, which was an age of my life. I was using myself to play myself. I was playing with myself. And I was who? I was who? He went through me like a who? Like a who? Like a you know what? I kept a pretty tight diary for the fans, for the details. My uncle said there were two kinds of people in Bari for now. Those who go long and those who don't. I'm discursive. I'm associated. I couldn't spell. I couldn't write. If they liked me, I didn't know they had nothing to do with writing. My mother committed suicide. She liked to live in the garage. And the room was where she died of cancer. There was no legitimate suicide. Not dead. Not killed herself. You know, given that there was a voice language. And everything is going fine. Everything is going fine. Except for the squirrels, the gypsy moth, and a pig farmer named Rocky. I told him he can't hold yet. He was pretty radical. But I've always been rooting for that breakthrough. You reached a module. And I became more popular. I was told that was my next president was on him and lithium. I don't think I could do another one more. Being a dad is fantastic. Very crowning. And it's got me out of myself because believe me, their needs are bigger than yours. Boris came to me very early on with questions about death. He wasn't even four. Everyone knows they're going to die, but no one really believes in it. I like telling a story of life better than I do living it. One of the ways to reincarnate is to tell your story. I know this pleasure, but it's like coming back. Well, I don't know if all of you have seen the film, but if not, it's really an amazing documentary. So I've seen it a few years back and just loved it. It really gives a great introduction into his work and into his life. So it was great. And you produced the film. I produced it. Yes. I produced it with two other people, Josh Blum and Amy Hobby. Yeah. Well, I would love to start the evening with a question to all of you. So how did you get involved with Spalding Grace's work? How did you meet him? Mike's Nana. I'll start because I have the least involvement. I am a performer and a person who has been in the dance and performance scene, and I knew Spalding sideways through that and was friends with other people in the Worcester group. Not so much with Spalding. And I knew Kathy a little bit. And then about a year and a half after Spalding's death, Kathy was looking to put together a reading of his work for what would have been his 65th birthday. And someone put us together as someone that I could help her do that. And then that grew into us sort of trying to create a whole piece out of Spalding's excerpts from his monologues, from his journals, et cetera. I mean, it was an extraordinary privilege to all of a sudden be looking at all these journals and the shows and the texts. And it's amazing material. So then I worked on that with Kathy. We worked on that for like a year before we even performed it, I think. In my living room, she'd come out to Sag Harbor. We did a whole storyboard from his journals. And that's when we got the idea that we didn't want one person retelling the story of Spalding but making it into five characters, which you're going to hear a little bit pretty soon from that. How did you meet Spalding? I met Spalding when I was in college in 1965. In Schenectady, where I'm from. In Schenectady. And he was a friend, a boyfriend of Liz McCombs. I met Liz in college. Complicated. Skidmore Union. Boys school, girls school, boys girls. Things like that. But it was also through an art teacher who basically we both admired. And I began to hang out with Liz and we hung out together. And then she came to the city one summer. I think it was 66. Rented a subled an apartment on Tompkins Square Park. And one day Spalding arrived. And I met him for the first time. And he seemed very aloof and mysterious and unreachable in a funny way. And I was very impressed with him. And thought, well, this is, he's a real man. He's a real guy. And then Liz and Spalding began to work. Spalding of course joined the performance group under Richard Schectner in the early 70s. And then Liz also joined the group. And they began to work together and do performance pieces of their own. And essentially became what the performance group evolved into, which is the Worcester group. And I was making films at the time and we're starting to make films at the time. And at that point we were starting to, I was working with them and putting films and before video using film, that they would use, making films with them that they would use in the performances. That they would project or use somehow in the performances that would play out in some, another text we always thought of it. Oh, let's put another film in here and have another text, a level of text, textual text, whatever. And visual text. And that was the end of it, or the beginning of it. And we became very close. And that was it. And then you just, life goes on. And then we point up like this. And I met Spalding in 1990 in Rochester, New York where I was working at a theater and my boss had asked Spalding if he wanted to come up to Rochester to perform his recent monologue, which was Monster in a Box then. And I picked him up to the airport and then we were together until he died, 2004. But not together. I mean, it was a very rocky relationship to get to a point where we were in a relationship and having a family and children. And we had two boys. I had a daughter who was three when we first met. And he took on, I mean, he really was like a dad to her as well. So we have two boys who are now 19, 23, and my daughter's almost 30. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the tradition and about his beginnings and how this all started for him, how he got into theater and what was the tradition that he came out of? One thing I want to say is that he was told when he was a boy in high school that he was dyslexic, but they didn't really know what that was then, that he was backwards. So he didn't have a lot of confidence about what he was going to do after he graduated high school. He knew he wanted to go to college, but he didn't have a lot of confidence or a clear idea of what he wanted to do. And then it was in the theater in Texas, right, that he found his voice or... He went to Emerson. Well, he went to Emerson. First BU, right, or BC, Boston College. And then he went to Emerson. And that's where he sort of got the acting bug and found his voice. At that particular moment when someone said, told him that that was in Texas, that you can really tell a story. Do you remember reading that anywhere? Well, it's the Alley Theater in Houston is where he goes. He thinks he's going to be an actor, and so he tries to take acting jobs. And I think the Alley is where he gets frustrated with... Acting. Acting and other people's stuff and having to... And he wants to have more of his own voice. Yeah. He was the way... Again, he was... He did more. Where Liz went to school was a all-girl school. When they did productions, they had to hire men for the productions. So he had gone up to Saratoga, and he was basically performing in the theater, which is how he met Liz. It was also a wonderful kind of coffee shop called Cafe Lena, which was kind of a pit stop on the way between Boston and New York. All the kind of great folk heroes, besides Dylan and the McGarregal sisters and Dave Van Runk and blah, blah, blah, would basically perform there. There was a little theater company there, which he tells the stories about in his monologues, his early monologues. He tells the stories about performing. In fact, I don't know if you want to show it now. Okay. In fact, after Rumsdick Road, there was a trilogy of three pieces that he and Liz did with the Worcester Group, as the Worcester Group. The first one was Psychonic Point, and that was a kind of nonverbal piece, in which they were just kind of a dance piece. Very small, very few people, and just a beautiful kind of choreography of dances, but dance movements, very simple. Hardly dance, more like walking around. Then came Rumsdick Road, which is the biography or the telling of a story about his mother's and his mother's death, his mother's suicide. After Rumsdick Road comes Neat School, and in Neat School, which you're about to see a section of, a very, very small part of, he sits down at a table, at a long table with two other people, has a glass of water and a record player, which is the record player you saw in the Steven Soderbergh clip, and he begins to tell the story of how he first did the T.S. Eliot play, The Cocktail Party, and that was done at this cafe Lena in Saratoga in sometime in the 60s, and this was the first time he really sat down and talked directly to the audience. The audience is sitting about at the end of this table, and he is talking across to them, and basically add living and telling the story while he plays the record of The Cocktail Party. And just to get, I have, we're now starting this third production, or whatever it's called, with this third recreation, like Rumsdick, in which we're going to try to rebuild, re-put together some sense of what this theater experience was like. And what you'll see is a three-minute introduction to it, essentially, which kind of just tries to sort out or show the space of the theater, the kind of, the levels in which it was performed. It was very complicated. The audience sat very high up, looked down into a pit in which the act is performed in the, so to speak, pit, which was the bottom of the stage, or the bottom of the theater, and also, but it began with this long table in front of the audience directly in the stands. So, if we can play that, this is very crude. It's literally just out of the, nothing, it's actually raw. Those are the stands. That's the house, and the red tent, which appears constantly or repeatedly in all of these pieces. So the audience would go up the stairs and take a seat in these stands. And here was the long table. And at the table was Spalding, that's Ron Voda, and forget her name, I'm sorry. Thank you. It wasn't Joan yet. So this is the setup, and that's basically Spalding's position there in the center. That's, who is that? Someone I know or knew. And they would also perform in that, that was a film I made that they used in the piece, rejected in the center of the stage. And then, once again, and that's again the original setup. Spald played the doctor, Dr. Harkoth or Harko or something. Many things were performed in this box. That's Ron Voda, Libby House, Spalding. Essentially a kind of mad scientist. The audience is sitting in the stands and Spald is playing the record. I didn't see a cobblestone. I don't know who took the picture, but I think that Alec Ennis is sitting down. I didn't get exposed to the cocktail party. Sorry, he's about to say, I got exposed to the cocktail party when John Winivans, who was running the theater, crazy man, relatively theater person, basically, he ran the theater for the Cafe Lena and as Spald is about to describe, which is kind of funny, maybe I shouldn't have turned it off, but he's saying, well, we would just sit around and say, what should we do? And someone would say, well, how about the cocktail party? And someone would say, yes, let's do the cocktail party. So that basically is the origins, as far as I can tell, of the first time he sat down at the table. I've never seen that before. Are you working on the film? We're trying to do what we did with the rum stick, which is try to put it together. It's a bit of an archeological dig, because there's very little stuff left. This soundtrack is terrible. It was shot, this was a piece that we have some video footage, black and white, but it's the kind of footage where the ghost, the face is... It's like a hologram. Well, it might have to be the hologram. And so one of the theories is, well, okay, maybe people will fill in some of it. I was going to ask Kathy if Theo sounds like sparkling enough. Yeah. Okay. That would be cool. Because it's... Yeah. And so that someone may read it and other people may perform it. It's pretty madcap, so it's not necessarily... I don't think it's going to interfere with the play that much, but anyway, it's tough to bring this stuff back. It's hard. It's hard. Even if it's well photographed or well shot, it's just... Who wants to watch a play on screen, in a way? I mean, that's always a problem. That's all we have. It's like seeing art in a... But okay. But Wimestick Road is a really beautiful documentation of the work. And I think also pretty successful. I mean, there's really an interest. I remember seeing it down at the Archeological Archives. Yeah, that's what I saw. And it was packed. Yeah, it was great. So there's really an interest in Spalding Grace and the Worcester Groups work. So where did it go from there? So those were the beginnings. And then how did he actually end up solo performing? Well, from there, they did a couple of other plays, but then he started to work on his own. So that while they were doing... I think the next thing was Pointe Judith or something. Another name that... All of these names, Pointe Judith, Remstigirl, his biography names, the places he grew up, the streets he grew up on, they did Pointe Judith. But then he started... He did this first piece, I think, Sex and Death. Sex and Death, 14. Yeah. And that's when he began to... Find his voice. Find his voice and basically step out of the plays. And gradually, over the few years, he stepped out of the plays far enough that he wasn't in the plays. And that was really... I mean, he told me I wasn't in a relationship with them, but he's told me it was really hard to leave the safety of the Worcester Group because that was like his safety net. In a way, it was his comfort zone to go out there by himself and do 90 minutes of a monologue with just him and a glass of water and a desk in the microphone. Much more exposed. Very, at that point, rather... And it was once a radical or at least risky in the sense that doing monologues now is not necessarily so unusual. He is the grandfather of it, I think. Yes, definitely the grandfather. If not the something, what else? What's the better... But there was one thing that Spelding used to say about monologues that I always like to share with audiences. He goes, everyone thought they knew him, that he was telling them everything about his life or that period that he was talking about in the monologue. He goes, well, the monologue's 90 minutes and I'm 50-something years old. There's a lot more there that people don't know, but I always like that quote from him. I always found it really interesting because Spelding talks in some of the intros to his books and in some of the journals, talks about his process of writing, which was not to write, which was to perform them, so that he would perform the monologue and record it on an audio recording and listen to it that night. And then he would make, oh, I should do that. But he wouldn't write it down. He would do it again the next night and say the story in a different way and record that and then go back and listen to that. He tells a great story about when the New York Times magazine asked him to write one of those interesting one-page, back-page stories. No, they were putting them on the cover. But they asked him to write something, to write a piece. And he said, well, I don't write. And they said, yeah, that's funny, but go ahead and you write a piece for us. And he said, no, really, I don't write. And finally he asked, and maybe it was you, Ken, but he asked a friend to come over and sit down across the desk from him and he would tell the story and record it. And he had somebody transcribe it, and that's what he gave to the Times. But even in that trailer, he talks about, he can't write, I can't spell. But I like this way of figuring out what the story is by telling it and revising it and telling it and revising it. He hated writing, but he would make himself write in his journal every morning with his coffee. And that would be really about it, for the writing. And he never typed, he never used a computer, it was all long-hand in his marble journals. Almost every day. And how did he write his novel? He didn't have a hand after. But he had to give it to a transcriber and his penmanship was pretty easy to read then. Good 12-year-old. It was a good transcriber in Queens. That's the whole story of Monster in a Box. This impossibility of writing this thing which keeps getting longer and it keeps trying to avoid it and it keeps going. It's a real challenge for him to write a novel. I heard once in an interview, I heard him say, that he's dancing with the audience, which is something that I find is a very nice phrase, which sort of also counters the way he presented the work, sitting still and not moving. That's also something that the storytelling by the one person show that's not moving around in the space but actually being still, sitting still. What was the whole impetus behind that? Can anyone talk about that? It worked the first time I think why change is what he thought. I don't know. That's what I always thought. It was like his brand, you know what I mean? Before that word was popular. This is what I do and this is how it works for me for future monologues. He would try to break out of it a little bit. He did this thing called interviewing the audience, which I loved. He would go and say you were all in the lobby of the show and he would just go up to people he thought he could have a good conversation with, write down their name on an index card, take like 30 names, go backstage and pick out, I don't know, like five of them and then call them up on stage to have just a simple conversation. He would always start it out with the first question would be how did you get here tonight? Then it would go to this conversation. It was amazing how it worked because you think he did a great job but he had a great interviewing skill. He could make boring stories seem exciting. He did try to do other little things off from the monologue. I also think that thing about just telling the story, that's what he's fascinated with. That's what he writes about a lot and talks about a lot even in that opening is that it's the story of what happened. I know with interviewing the audience people always said afterwards oh well you set that up, you knew what they were going to say but he didn't. It's this interest and extraordinary gift for taking the stories of ordinary life. Morning, noon and night is like a day in the life of a family. You wake up and there's nothing extraordinary happens in this day but it's a fantastic story and he weaves it into a fantastic story and he tells it as such a fantastic story but I think it's partly taking that material. And his great gift aside from the monologues too is that he paid attention to the details so that really helped with his storytelling. Maybe I actually reminded of something. At one point living on 93rd Street and he was working at the American Place Theater which was on 70s in the 70s somewhere and he was doing plays. They did traditional plays, I don't know, Endicott and the Red Cross, something I remember that and something else about the gates of death or something. But he would come back with a couple of... I was actually homeless so to speak at the time I was sleeping on the floor of that place and that was Liz and his place and he would come back with a couple of pale ales India pale ales after the pale show he'd walk home from 77th to 93rd and he would come back with stories of the day that just had us crying. We were just on the floor weeping and it was one of those things where you say oh man you got to tell somebody this shit because this is really great and you think no don't spoil it don't make it a performance piece you know it's funny I have a little bit of a different feeling about the interview in the audience I think Spauld was pretty much he wasn't honestly interested in other people I disagree with you completely I think he used that I think he used them to make his own stories to build a story of his making and so that I think other people's stories interfered with him he used to say everyone has a story to tell they just have to learn how to tell it well so he would get them on stage to tell it well that's what I felt they'd be competing with him he didn't want that did he have some competition? well eventually yeah absolutely because everyone was trying to outperform him I mean people getting up there you want to hear a story they intentionally want to get him on his knees well maybe before we have the reading and excerpt from the play stories left to tell I would quickly love to ask the two of you how did it all come about did you decide that you wanted to create this piece? well the first thing like after Spaulding died and I started to go through his journals and I realized there was like all this enormous documentation from his journals and film clips and everything and I just really wanted to do everything I could possibly think of or with the assistance from friends and other people think of projects that would keep his legacy going and so he wasn't just remembered you know for the act of suicide that his work still kept going on after he died and so the first thing was I was approached by PS122 like Lucy said and we were going to do some sort of tribute and so you heard the story about how we realized that we actually could do a play out of the material that we had and that's it was a year of like dissecting his journals to make this arc of his life and again the same thing it was a year of doing like maybe once a month read-throughs with different people and see you know oh did we get enough of that information or that story is too long I would also say just to and tell me if I'm wrong but one of the reasons you have this idea is that Spalding's Memorial a couple of people did and Kate Valk and a few other people read some of Spalding's stories that was at readings the Kate Valk was at at Barnes and Noble that was one of the light bulb moments and the light bulb is really like can other people read Spalding's words okay and that's something that certainly we got a lot of hesitation and pushback from people like you know it's all about Spalding and I think one of the great things for me is that I'm not saying that you know we wouldn't all love to just be watching Spalding tell these stories for sure but it underlined what good writing it was that it was theatrical writing that someone else could take it and do it this way and that way it had some flexibility to it like any you know any play does so that it could be taken on by other voices I have a question did the readings change what was read each performance or no well not once it was up on Mineta Lane in the development time we were doing the readings at Bowery Poetry Project ZBGVs we did a reading and that was yeah I remember that that was just to figure out what worked kind of like you know how Spalding worked once you said it you kept it and different people would read the same and we tried to really contrast it like you know we had a female actress read some of the sex scenes you know or something just you know as if she was the male it was really we tried to contrast the character the actors with the material as much as possible so yeah what was his first piece that was like sitting at a table with sex and death and that was what you before like 80 no no no 70 79 late and then it premiered at the Mineta Lane theater in when was this we were just trying to remember 2007 Mineta Lane is 2007 we worked on it for a couple of years different iterations and then then we toured it around the country for a year after that after it closed Mineta Lane where is it now dramatic publishing owns the rights to it so anyone can perform it if they want to buy it and I mean you know pay the royalty fee and we would I mean Lucy both of us I can say for sure would love to remount it at some point yeah but I also thought you know to advertise or get out because I always feel like it should be a perfect thing for universities right it's five different people there are all these juicy monologues you can do it with any set or no set and I would love it that would be my dream of it so that that other generation gets to know these stories and the work yes so we will have a brief excerpt from the piece and afterwards we will have a Q&A with the audience so I should say that the piece as it you guys can stay there oh we can stay okay that the piece basically tries to in a sort of collage way take you through the arc of his life and the piece itself is 90 minutes this is 15 minutes but so you're going to get a very abbreviated little you know excerpts from different parts of Spalding's life and his work in 1778 the furthest back that I can remember is mom feeding me in my wooden high chair when I wouldn't eat she'd start wrapping out the opening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony da da da da and say that's fate knocking now I wouldn't say that's exactly a performance but it was something more abstract than eat your food dear or think of the starving Koreans which was in fact around the time of the Korean War I still think of it it was always hard to imagine those starving Koreans and even harder now that there are Korean delis on every corner I was bored with life I know I shouldn't have been I know I should be thankful but it was flat it was just a flat thing and I would keep hyping it up with this kind of acting out for instance Fourth of July some fireworks go off outside I'm just a kid so I run to the window and I say mom come quick Ross Jayman our neighbor's up on the roof shooting his kids now this was in the old days when that wasn't done so often and my mother would rush to the window believing it and she would go I'm spuddy dear no no no now why do you have to do this that summer the bay was clear with no algae we could see all the way down to the bottom and mom and I would swim together if I couldn't see everywhere in all directions at once which was of course impossible I would go into a sort of panic she was a good relaxed swimmer as if she belonged to the bay mom never noticed my panic she swam strong and fearless ahead of me then we'd dry off in the sun and eat lunch together side by side mom always had something simple for lunch like a glass of milk and a tuna fish sandwich I wanted to fly the nest a big part of me wanted to get out of there I wanted so to go to Bali or at least a province town I wanted to go to province town and I don't know get in trouble maybe even fall in love whatever that was I needed to get away from mom it was too sticky and warm to be right so in the morning I'd load up mom's big tin bread box ford with all the goodies I felt I needed to survive on the beach in province town LL Bean sleeping bag instant breakfast I'd go and say goodbye to mom and head out for province town a few blocks from home I'd end up turning around and heading back unloading the car and swimming and eating lunch with mom on the lawn one last swim one last lunch the next day I'd load up the car again and with my sleeping bag mom's metrical and instant breakfast I'd drive a few miles farther and then just end up turning around and coming back mom never asked me why I kept coming back we'd just swim and eat lunch together and sit there on the edge of Narragansett Bay I never made it to province town that summer Journal entry in 1982 the unobserved life doesn't feel like living once I no longer felt God watching I began to watch myself I have found that I like the fact that I've been writing every day I've been writing as though I was up against a deadline and as I write now I feel that good writing could help you to write your way out of almost anything I think of myself as a collage taking bits and scraps from the growing heap of my life in order to create a more conscious narrative form I came to know of my life through the telling of it I went out and it was winter in Minneapolis a group of us I think there were probably 17 of us men and women did this incredible ceremony that Azaria Thornbred Thornbred led with a peace pipe where she called all the Indian spirits from all four directions we were all inside a tent sitting naked in a circle on straw which is laid over the snow it's dark and it's cold in there because no hot rocks have been brought in yet Azaria instructs us that the sweat ceremony could last a long time two or three hours toward the end of the prayers we'd pray to give something away some condition that we no longer wanted but she warns us in no case in no case should we identify with what another person gives away because if we take it on we're going to be in trouble so just pass it on don't identify with it just pass it on let it go out of the tent after that she will come and pour cold water over the rocks and we're supposed to sit in silence and listen to the hot rock steam and we often actually speak and give us valuable information that's what Azaria told us I like this very much this whole very ritualized ceremony I like it I just hope that people don't go on I mean there are 17 people in there and after all and I hope that prayers aren't too long because it's going to get real hot people begin praying oh great spirit this is Robert speaking I want to remain humble and get rid of my macho qualities I have spoken it comes around to me and I say oh great spirit this is Spaulding speaking and I pray that I can maintain a sincere and open attitude in this ceremony and not pollute it with my heady analysis and ironic commentary and end up just turning this sacred event into just another story that I will try to sell to the American public and the entire tent goes which is kind of a supportive cheer to say let's see if you can pull that one off more hot rocks are brought in now it's starting to get a little hot oh man I know what they mean by sweat and my god I've got my nose down on the ground and I'm trying to breathe in fresh air from under the bottom of the tent and all I can see is that sign on the outside of the steam bath at my health club in New York City that says do not exceed 15 minutes under any circumstances and I'm thinking who is this Azaria Thornbird anyway how long have I been in here what's going on more hot rocks are brought in lots now the place is really hot the place is reeking people are down on their sides they're choking, they can't breathe my pulse is up to 160 another round of prayer starts we're supposed to give something away I can't wait to pray I'm telling you I feel like my heart is going to explode I've got my hand on my pulse this is Susan speaking I want to give away my gluttony I have spoken it comes around to me I say oh great spirit this is Spalding speaking and I want to give away the fear that I am about to have a heart attack at this very moment and just as I say this the guy next to me who is about my age leaps up and he runs out of the tent screaming my heart is popping my heart is popping my heart is popping and I'm fine my pulse slows down he has just taken all my fear and run right out the door with it Azaria says someone has broken the sacred circle here the power has gone out of the sweat now listen we're going to do the fourth round of prayers where we'll listen to the rocks talk and if any of you feels you have to go you must leave now because when this flap shuts you're in oh my now I at the same time am very claustrophobic and find it difficult to take orders but I am determined to ride this thing out I sit hard and I just hope that the hot rocks don't take too long you know she says I'm closing the flaps she closes it and this guy who is a member of the lodge with a ponytail down to his ass leaps up and charges for the flap she throws her naked body in front of him and says get back lame deer get back he holds himself back on the hay crying shit fuck fuck fuck everyone is holding him down and chanting ho ho ho everyone's ho hoing him ho hoing him until at last he's calm we sit there panting and we listen to the hot rocks talk I didn't understand a word journal entry 1992 I went to a Chinese deli to buy water and I walked out I had a very blissful moment could almost call it a perfect moment I watched a fast blowing cloud break up and go through the most extreme colors of turquoise to magenta I felt suddenly free and open and not in need for me the bubbles are often perfect moments that lift me out of my sadness and despair I can't be creative without being self-destructive I'm like Humpty Dumpty there are two me's deeply built in the smasher and the rebuilder I am both Humpty and the Kingsman I am both lost and found when I was in therapy about two years ago one day I noticed that I hadn't had any children and I like children at a distance I wondered if I'd like them up close and I wondered why I didn't have any I guess I'd always fantasize that if and when I had a child it would be in northern California we, me and some sweet hippie beauty I was living with would have a water birth or the child would be brought into the world by a midwife in a teepee somewhere I always thought that one day it would all at last happen to me in northern California in fact I had begun to define my life as what I did waiting to move to northern California I wanted to see my son after all I'd never seen him and now he was eight months old I was completely unaware that this was a long time I was under the impression that once a baby always a baby I guess I thought of six years old as the end of babyhood I had no idea that eight months was quite a way along in the development of a child I called Kathy and went to see them she woke the baby, lifted him out of the crib and he went straight for her breast when I saw that I knew there was no need for a blood test I saw the back of my father's head and his head, I saw my brother Rocky's eyes, I saw a distant mirror, I saw a little lust flower, I saw a glorious accident, I saw a completely formed whole human being and I experienced a perfect paradox at that moment I knew now that I could die I had to stay alive to help this little guy through Kathy had a radical plan she said, you haven't seen him for eight months you should go bond with him take him off alone to your summer house in the country and I did I thought it was a completely mad idea but I didn't question it I was on the train to Brewster North with this eight month old creature who was in my arms I assumed he was beautiful because everyone on the train kept stopping to say, oh my goodness what a lovely granddaughter you have when I got to the house I put him on the floor like a rug wrap, a hamster a cat or a dog let him do his thing while I do my thing get out the Bloody Mary mix a salmon, the green peas and prepare dinner and then I had to change his diaper bending over him I looked down into his eyes and I fell in I did not expect the gaze that came back it was absolutely forever long, pure, empty not innocent because way beyond innocence mere being, pure consciousness the observing self that I'd always been trying to catch was staring back at me they were no agenda eyes clear, open not blinking, not judging not tempting, not needing not hurting, not consoling just pure not old, not new because not in time and I just stared until I blinked I had to pull away I couldn't go on anymore in there I took him in my arms and we were together for five hours he ate with me in my lap and when I chewed my green peas he reached into my mouth and took them to feed himself I got the image of a mother bird mother Robin the way they spit the food into their baby's mouths so I took his little head and holding it I went to spit the green peas into his mouth like a mother bird and he gave me a straight arm but my god, he's got boundaries where would he get them at eight months I could learn something from him his dad doesn't have them at 52 journal entry 1997 the forest used to come up to me and say dad, tell me a scary story and I who am really not very good at making up stories said look around you this is the scary story but what I don't add and should is that it's also a story about wonder and boredom and self pity, dreck transcendence and love I think I shut my heart down to protect myself from mom's sadness but the children opened my heart they have been a blessing and these memories burn in my heart like religious icons A. Marissa toasting me Marissa toasting me on my birthday for bringing her brother forest into the world B. Me and forest on the way to Martha's vineyard in that old Ford escort and when I was so hot and lost outside Providence the forest who was sleeping in his car seat beside me woke and kissed me C. and most certain by Theo's face at birth and the honest confusion it expressed I just looked down at him and saw this big why expression coming back at me he seemed to be asking me why this why something and not nothing oh children the most any of us can hope for is to inhabit a few graceful moments in time and to recognize them as such the rest is an unsolved mystery thank you that was really great how many of you have seen the production of this play so not not that many maybe a very brief question how was it how was it directed how was it produced how did it look like yeah the director yeah when we did stage it I mean when we would do the reading we were often just all sitting you know we would put the journal reader in the sort of classic spalding look and we kept that for the production but the rest of it was just it was sort of a stage with a couple of levels and people would move around and sometimes stand and tell their story and sometimes sit but simple movement and then just stop and tell your story the backdrop of the set which was very lovely was we just Xeroxed pages from his journals so his own writing and that would just hung and you know it's like a form you couldn't see any of the writing but it was you know you could tell that it was sort of very simple okay so I would like to open the forum we're also recording all of our events so when you have a question someone will give you a mic and please use it because we're recording that okay you Chen maybe with the mic yes how much with any were his monologues spur of the moment created or were they if he did one if he did the monologue the next day was the same words or did he improvise well the monologues most of them were created from some kind of crisis he was going through in his life so he would when he had an idea like for example Grey's Anatomy was really about his eye surgery because he was losing the eyesight in one eye and he would then go back maybe a year or two from his monologues and start making an outline and that was the key and outline with all the key events that happened that was going to create the arc of this monologue and then we talked about earlier he would go to like a small theater like this like a PS122 with a hundred people and then he'd listen to the audio tape and cut and edit that way and then it would be maybe a year later he'd bring it to Lincoln Center and he would perform it there and then tour it around the country they would become set he had it where he wanted it it was the same every night he wrote in his journal every day every day and so he had a kind of internal monologue going pretty much all the time and so as it would kind of shape out he would basically you know work off of that material and when you saw him on stage you would see he'd come out with a notebook but it was just an outline reading to remind him of what he was supposed to think about from what I can recall I don't think he ever lost his place he would improvise a little bit here and there but he never he would always do it almost the same every night wow I'm just overwhelmed speechless in some ways thank you that was wonderful a couple of things that come to mind in a question I keep on hearing Jean Shepherd I grew up with Jean Shepherd I'm about the same age as Spalming and I can just hear Jean Shepherd come to life and I just love it and I used to believe that I would see go and turn on televisions and hear Jean Shepherd on channel 9 with the television blank would just be black with no image and you just listen in the early days the other thing I hear is when you mention that he hid himself away until his children came and I hear that as a father I'm actually a documentary filmmaker looking at doing a documentary on for new fathers because they have no idea what's going on and I hear in your voice what the love and how he just kind of blossomed as a came into his own and he really didn't he obviously didn't plan on becoming a father there was no planning there and when we first met he said I have no interest in having children of my own and it was maybe six months after I met him and he was doing this project at the 52nd street project where they worked with kids from the inner city and the children who were in plays with them are monologues in his case and I looked at him afterwards and I said you're going to be a dad you're so good with children he goes don't say those words to me he was really afraid of it he was really afraid of becoming a father I think I met Spalding in 1984 Olympics where he did sexing cars and a lot of other things and I met him a few times the question is mental illness and how that played a role into everything he did including his relationship with you and his children can you talk a little bit about that well yeah I mean he was definitely prone to depression and he struggled with his mother's suicide I mean it's really dominant most every monologue he you know did and he struggled with that his whole life his mother's mental illness and he really did try to not repeat what was her ultimate fate something that I think this man here earlier we were talking about it he did a lot of people don't realize at the end he had brain damage from our car accident in Ireland Oliver Sacks was his doctor and beautifully wrote an article last year before he died in the New Yorker they explained Spalding's case and everything so I honestly don't think he killed himself because of mental illness even though he was prone to it I really do believe that he had brain damage and that's what ultimately made him you know kill himself it's post traumatic stress you know as we're seeing more and more of today from vets and football players and you know car accidents I just one thing about children and Spalding oddly enough in Rumstick Road there are four children in that school in that school thanks in that school there are four children and the children play the roles in the cocktail party that Spalding is talking about performing that they're going to go down into the space and perform and they at school would be a very difficult thing to do these days because the children were for all practical purposes kind of used and abused in a way they were picked up and moved around they all smoked cigarettes they were lighting the kid's cigarette all the time they were passing out on the floor and being dragged around or shook in the air quite mad but this involvement with these children was also a kind of surrogate play of Spalding and he got very close to them you know they were very they're lovely and stayed in touch they're still they were four of them one died of cancer at this point but the other kids have survived relatively well obviously their parents were kind of loony to let them go into this thing and you know perform in this way and so it would be something that wouldn't happen today they'd be closed down but it was an interesting thing that it was so much involved with children and that in fact the next piece is I think Michael Rifkin is in the next piece, Point Judith and he performs and there's a lot of and there's a lot of embracing of the children in it a lot of physical contact he holds them and he hugs them and he carries them around and it's really another otherworldly piece it's quite beautiful but it's also interesting in the sense of the child my child father so to speak and he was a really terrific dad he was a really giving generous father the thing about the accident too which is it kind of it played out in a way that fulfilled his worst fears because it's one point he said in one of the monologues I forget he said something what could make me do that what weird thing could make me do what my mother did staggering how life can just do exactly what you plan or didn't plan anyway that's hold on I'm going to make you say it in the microphone hold on one second how old was he when his mother committed suicide around 26 he was a grown man actually oh he was from the time he was like 10 on she had been in and out of institutions so he lived with that he grew up with that she was mentally ill on and off she was institutionalized a number of times with suicide issues she had electric shock and she was a Christian scientist and he grew up with a family his mother was a Christian scientist must have been very hard for him as a son growing up even to a daughter is very important you know not having her as a whole person you know and she there's this it's in the movie that Steven did there's this one point where he's coming home from college and she's asked him how should I do it Spud how should I do it should I do it in the car should I do it in the water she was a burden for him as it was for his other brothers too and then he was away he was in Mexico when she killed herself he didn't find out for what a month when he came back the novel that he's trying to write is called impossible vacation because he could never go on another vacation because one time he goes on vacation he comes back and finds out that his mother has killed herself those kind of people from what I know have mental illness and reading about it is that they're chronic eventually they're going to do it they're going to succeed you know right but that's why I think it's really important that everyone here knows too that he did have mental illness but it was the brain damage I believe that made him kill himself too many things came together for that in other words other things could happen but that may not he struggled with it in the shows all the time he talked about it a lot he brought it into the open all the time that was kind of therapeutic for him too I have a question regarding going back to the journal writing did you not say that he had to force himself to do this obviously it was a pattern every day but talk a little bit about the actual journal writing the process the one contradiction I think that you're picking up on is that I was talking about how he doesn't write the monologues he does them in performance but he takes notes he writes a lot in the journal so he has all of this material to go back to so there's lots of detail that are in the journals they translate when he becomes into the spoken story but he definitely is quite religious about writing in the journal every day he would write every day but I think once he had a family and taking on the responsibility of raising children he wrote less he'd get up in the morning on the weekend I know I have to write in the journal a little bit so you might see a paragraph on a Saturday or something I think he wrote more when he was younger it was writing informal pieces or pieces he was asked to write that he found impossible those were tasks but journals he kept constantly so there was no I guess just two things I think it's funny that you guys are so open to talking about his personal life just because I was at a Philip Glass workshop and I really wanted to ask a question about his ex-wife Candy who had passed away but everybody else they're all huge music three nerds so they were just asking about that so my observation I thought the casting of Libby and Rumsick Road just with that there's that part where she's just doing this for like 15 minutes how does one do that? exactly and I don't think that she's like Looney in Vermont right now because of that specifically but I just find it really poetic and sad that it was such a beautiful part and that she's there now Libby just disappeared afterwards I actually saw her a year before Spaulding died in Vermont how was that? I thought she was like okay she didn't seem that bad apparently she's getting along relatively okay but she did go through a breakdown the whole it's almost the whole group is like a serious mental asylum except for Peyton, I think Peyton's okay Peyton survived Peyton has a restaurant in Arizona but the early people between different diseases and suicide or normal things that happen in life and all wacko the what was your question? no one thing I wanted to say when you say we're so open about talking about it this was the material of Spaulding's life exactly and even in his last monologue is after the accident and when he is struggling and he's trying to figure out can he even go forward and what's he's happening and he does have a final monologue that he again is trying to process even what he was doing what was happening to him after the accident by performing it by making it into a story so that is the material from which his work was made that's a good point and it's really critical to know that about someone's family personal life but that's what his work was so it's hard to it wasn't Phil Glass it wasn't Baroque or Bach it was something me of him I guess it's sort of a self-serving question sorry but I had this idea before I found out about interviewing the audience where I was like wouldn't it be great if there was just a whole show where it was just interviewing the audience and then I found out about it and I was like damn it, I can't do that and I don't want to do the exact same thing and I've given permission to people to do it if you have went try it that was sort of my question because I would love to it just seems really interesting and I don't think it could ever not be something new if you're just talking to people because that's the beauty in a conversation to Kathy after Norma has a question I just wanted to say because Kathy hasn't mentioned it but one of her many enormous accomplishments in the years following Spalding's death was to oversee the publication of an edition of Spalding's journals so for people who don't know those are in print it's a remarkable editing job I'm sorry I forget the name of the journalist Eleanor Casey I mean really brilliant job of kind of editing and distilling and juxtaposing these materials and they're fascinating reading so if anyone is interested that is out there that and the Soderbergh film both followed the live performance followed the play so it's funny the play in so many ways kind of launched the other projects foresaw these enormous projects that would follow I also found it interesting when we were working on it but you do find the source material in the journals you see the things like oh that turned into that monologue that found its way there it's an interesting and I'd have to say of all the projects there were five projects I did after Spalding died that was the hardest because he didn't publish his journals before you know he was very selective about what he took from the journals to make into material so I was very protective about what I wanted in the book and what I absolutely refused to let them publish so that was the hardest project and actually Lucy was a great author on that one she goes don't put anything in that's going to make you or the children uncomfortable well that's the other thing is we have these kids who are still you know living so how much of the journals were published well yeah it's I think it's like almost 400 pages I think but he had over 200 journals so so we got maybe two more questions thank you first I just wanted to thank you all for sharing this evening with us and your reflections with us we really appreciate it as said Spalding's the material of his life was a material of his work so those of us who only knew him through his work so it felt like we knew him extraordinarily well he seemed to be so open with his work and with his life his experiences difficult experiences for those of us who just knew him through his work what aspect of knowing him of what he was like would be surprising to us or didn't come out from your experience in his work he was quiet at dinner parties we'd get all these crazy invitations because everyone thought he'd be the life of the party or the entertainer of the party and he'd be really quiet whereas Ken said when he first met him he thought he was aloof I thought he was aloof too he definitely had a kind of but that was a New England snobbery a New England classicism and quite impressive he was he was a tremendous I mean he was a tremendous thinker and a contemplator of life's issues and the ironies there some of that reading was just wonderful the readings you just heard it's just wonderful that's what we thrived on for a while and I and others near him just devouring each other's you know willingness to just shoot the shit so to speak he's an extraordinary human last one from Norm thank you I just wanted to say you know a lot of us only new Spalding in the Worcester group years and the years that followed and even when we saw him acting in a conventional sense in films or on television he was usually either cast as or himself kind of built on his Spalding persona that he had developed but in fact he was a great actor and if you look back at the films several of which exist of the performance group were predating the Worcester group there's a wonderful film of Richard Shekner's production of Sam Sheppard's Tooth of Crime and Spalding just burns up the stage and burns up the film and you only have to look at it for ten minutes and you go who is this guy and he really he took his acting action but if you see these films of him as a young actor that exist you can see that he could have been you know a very great actor in the conventional sense he was definitely on his way he finally hooked up with a good agent who was getting him all the like who got him on the nanny as you know the therapist and he was definitely heading that way I think and what we're going to end with is a clip of Spalding talking about being in Our Town on Broadway Greg Mosher directed Our Town on Broadway and asked him to play the stage manager and I just have to say it was really wonderful to look a couple years ago they were writing about oh the great it got bad reviews and in particular the Frank Rich was terrible to Spalding so he was a terrible stage manager horrible and you know a couple years ago there was this big thing in the times stage manager in Our Town and several people wrote about you know Spalding was the definitive so it was a nice resurrection of that but anyway this is a really fun excerpt from Monster in a Box I'd like to just I'm sorry the piece that Paul referred to is called The Tooth of Crime and it's interesting because Spalding played an aging rock star who is about to be kind of overthrown by the new rocker and and that's actually I that was my film I filmed it um no it's okay but okay maybe this is just he commits suicide at the end I completely forgot that you know because he can't he can't do the moves anymore that the new guy can do in the rock business in the world of music rock music end of story we will now watch the final clip Monster in a Box but I love doing the play actually I did I was able to get in touch with Thought in Wildest Language which helped me transcend anything the critics said and swept me away back to New England where I had originally come from where I once believed in God in eternity I talked about before I moved to New York City and became a hardcore Freudian existentialist and particularly the cemetery scene you see Emily dies in Childbirth and they have a funeral on stage in the last act and I had never been to a funeral before in my life I'd even miss my mother's funeral because I was trying to take a vacation in Mexico when all of that happened and now I'm going to a funeral eight shows a week Emily's and strangely enough this event is giving me a kind of closure around this whole issue with my mother and having missed her funeral and every night they would bring Emily on and bring her out in white dressed in white they would sing a hymn for her and they would leave cast her off and she would walk across stage dressed in white and step into a straight back chair which represented her grave surrounded by all the other recent dead all in their straight back chairs with the stars above and there they all were fully concentrated the little boy playing Emily's brother Wally Webb, 11 year old boy is sitting there for 40 minutes without blinking while I stand and talk about eternity and say things like you know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living for very long but they stay here until the earth's part of them burns away burns out they're waiting for something they feel is coming something important and great aren't they waiting for the eternal part of them to come out clear and every night I would say that 8 shows a week and every night basically it would be the same but often when you're doing a long run in the theater often you have what I call a unifying accident in which something happens so strange on stage that it suddenly unifies the audience together in the realization that they are only here for this one moment together it's not a film, it's not television and because of the nature of the accident we all know that it probably will never be repeated again in the same way and somewhere in the middle of the run that happened I was talking about the dead and I said they're waiting they're waiting for something they feel is coming something important and great and I turn to gesture to them waiting and just as I turn the little 11 year old boy projectile bombets wow like a hydrant it comes hitting one of the dead on the shoulder the other dead levitate out of their seats in fear and drop back down the little boy runs from the stage vomit pouring from his mouth splatter splatter splatter I am standing here on the stage my knees are shaking the chair is empty but there isn't a sound except for one little 10 year old boy in the eighth row he knows what he saw and I simply don't know what to do I don't know whether to go on with the next line as written and be loyal to thought and wilder or attempt what might be one of the most creative improv's in the history of American theater and then I decided last to be loyal to thought and wilder and simply continue with the next line and I turn to the empty chair aren't they waiting for the eternal part of them to come out clear perfect thank you so much Kathy, Lucy and Ken thank you all for coming that's right being here oh we will have a little reception so please hang around and talk with us and to each other