SOURCE: "Gray's Eminence," in Newsweek, July 28, 1986, p. 69.

In the following essay, McGuigan discusses Gray's artistic concerns and Gray's performance in Swimming to Cambodia.

Spalding Gray walks onstage carrying a spiral notebook with a cartoon cover and wearing the kind of plaid cotton shirt that a nerd would button up to his Adam's apple. He sits at a table with a pull-down map behind him, as though he's about to give a class report. And he begins to talk, the words spilling out of him with the speed and candor of a precocious child. But there's nothing juvenile about his intricately crafted monologue, Swimming to Cambodia. A funny, moving soliloquy that Gray has been performing at Lincoln Center in New York, along with another monologue called Terrors of Pleasure, it manages in 100 minutes to sketch the history of Cambodian genocide, recount the filming of The Killing Fields (in which...