April 1, 2003
Contact: Susan Gwynne
(805) 893-2098
e-mail: gwynne-s@sa.ucsb.edu
Writer and actor Spalding Gray presents the funny and poignant Interviewing the Audience at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Spalding Gray
- Interviewing the Audience
- The Santa Barbara debut of this work Gray has performed for 20 years
- Gray is the creator of Swimming to Cambodia and Morning, Noon and Night
- Wednesday, May 7 / 8 pm
- UCSB Campbell Hall
- General: $30/$27, UCSB students: $19/$16
- Tickets/information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Writer and actor Spalding Gray will present the Santa Barbara debut of his theater piece Interviewing the Audience on Wednesday, May 7 at 8 pm in UCSB Campbell Hall. A self-described “poetic journalist,” Gray has detailed his multifarious experiences in 18 monologues including Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box and Morning, Noon and Night. Called a “master of the first person singular,” Gray has no trouble baring his innermost neurotic struggles before an audience of strangers and describes his monologues as “creative narcissism.” Interviewing the Audience, however, lets him focus his insatiable curiosity on others. This piece, which Gray has never performed in Santa Barbara, turns the spotlight onto audience members, who reveal their innermost desires, joys and longings, prompted by his empathetic questions and quips. A virtuoso of what the Washington Post has called “public psychotherapy,” Gray creates a cathartic event for performer and audience. The Seattle Times calls Interviewing the Audience, “A raw display that out Oprahed Oprah.”
In addition to performing his own monologues, Gray has performed on Broadway playing Secretary William Russell in the 2000 production of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. He has also kept up a steady series of appearances on and Off-Broadway include portraying the Stage Manager in the revival of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by Gregory Mosher and Hoss, and in the Performance Group’s New York premiere of Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime. With the Wooster Group, which he co-founded in 1977, Mr. Gray wrote and performed the autobiographical trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island.
Gray’s film credits include: James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold; Jesse Dylan’s How High; Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields; Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia; Peter Cohn’s Drunks; David Byrne’s True Stories; Robert Mulligan’s Clara’s Heart; Gary Marshall’s Beaches; Paul Mazursky’s The Pickle; Steven Soderbergh’s King of the Hill; Ron Howard’s The Paper; John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon; and Jeremiah Chechik’s Diabolique.
Gray’s publications include a collection of monologues Sex and Death to the Age 14 (Random House); Swimming to Cambodia (Theater Communications Group); In Search of the Monkey Girl (Aperture Press); Monster in a Box (Orchards); Gray’s Anatomy (Vintage); and the novel Impossible Vacation (Knopf). His novel It’s a Slippery Slope was published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux and was released on compact disc by Mercury Records.
Gray has received an Obie Award for Swimming to Cambodia, a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Rockefeller Foundation. New York magazine hails him as “the perfect raconteur for our times,” while the Los Angeles Times asserts, “Spalding Gray may be the nation’s outstanding storyteller.”
On the evening of the performance concertgoers may enhance their experience by attending a tasty New England Clambake buffet—Spalding Gray’s favorite meal—served by the UCSB Faculty Club at 6 pm. The dinner is $21 per person; reservations must be made by May 1 by calling (805) 893-3096.
Courtesy of Borders Books, works by Spalding Gray will be available for purchase and signing after the performance. In Arts & Lectures’ on-going effort to make our events accessible to all who wish to enjoy them, Interviewing the Audience will be signed for the hearing impaired. Sign language interpretation is made possible by the California Arts Council in collaboration with the National Arts and Disability Center and by the Santa Barbara Foundation’s Access Theatre Endowment Fund.
Arts & Lectures has a long history of presenting Spalding Gray, most recently in Morning, Noon and Night in January 2001 and in It’s a Slippery Slope and Gray on Gray in April 1997. Interviewing the Audience is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by the Goleta Valley Voice and Borders. Tickets are $30 and $27 for the general public and $19 and $16 for UCSB students.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
Susan Gwynne at (805) 893-2098.