SOURCE: "Author's Note," in Swimming to Cambodia, Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1985, pp. xv-xviii.

The following essay prefaced the published version of Swimming to Cambodia. Gray characterizes himself as a "poetic reporter" who, unlike traditional journalists, prefers to "give the facts a chance to settle down until at last they blend, bubble and mix in the swamp of dream, memory and reflection."

In Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges the author relates, "I remember my father said to me something about memory. He said, 'I thought I could recall my childhood when we first came to Buenos Aires, but now I know that I can't. … Every time I recall something I'm not recalling it really, I'm recalling the last time I recalled it, I'm recalling my last memory of it.'"

Swimming to Cambodia evolved over two years and almost two hundred performances. It was constructed by recalling the first...