12 - True stories: Spalding Gray and the authenticities of performance

Summary

In a world that really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

There is a moment in Spalding Gray's famous performance piece, Swimming to Cambodia, where the fabric of its authenticity – the warp and weft of its reality and truth – appears to unravel before our eyes. And then, Penelope-like, Gray re-weaves the whole. As performance, the piece insists upon its authenticity. It is a one-man monologue, narrated by Gray, who for its duration sits behind a table in front of the audience. (The movie version begins with him walking down a Soho street, entering a performance space, sitting down before an audience that has been waiting for him, and, after taking a long drink of water, beginning to talk – this, it is clear, is his job. This is what Spalding Gray really does.) In the performance, he refers occasionally to maps and charts, but otherwise, for about one and a half hours, he tells the story of his participation in the filming of Roland Joffe's quasi-documentary film The Killing Fields, itself the true story of New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg and his Cambodian photographer, Dith Pran, with whom Schanberg had stayed in Phnom Penh after the American embassy had been evacuated in 1975 because he wanted to witness the occupation of the city by the Khmer Rouge.