Spalding Gray Critical Essay | Critical Review by Laurie Stone

SOURCE: "It's a Slippery Slope," in The Nation, December 23, 1996, pp. 33-4.

In the following review, Stone offers a generally unfavorable review of It's a Slippery Slope.

Spalding Gray is our bard of self-absorption. He's learned to see it with detachment, turning it into a subject, a hot tub big enough for a group soak. In Monster in a Box, he found the measure of his talent: his eye for irony and incongruity; his capacity to show himself as vulnerable without undercutting the effect with aggression; his ability to weave story elements into charged arrangements, so that even details that at first seem random eventually gain significance. He presented his prurient, blabbermouth personality as the deviant spawn of his tight-lipped, undemonstrative, alcoholic WASP nest; the leakage that diminished him in childhood was transformed into comic strength.

The serious trouble chronicled in his next monologue, Gray's Anatomy, made him funnier....
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