SOURCE: "With the Stream," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIX, No. 48, 27 November 1984, p. 123.

In the review below, Fuchs considers Swimming to Cambodia "an artistic culmination for Gray as well as an impressive political breakthrough."

Spalding Gray has created eight autobiographical monologues since 1979. Initially charming in their intimacy, they later wearied as we followed Gray into various formal experiments, such as selecting words randomly in a dictionary (India (and After)) or holding up cue cards (A Personal History of the American Theatre) to generate memories. The last few seemed so slight that one wondered whether the vein had run out. One longed for the Spalding Gray of Three Places in Rhode Island, the performance-art trilogy created with Liz LeCompte and the Wooster Group, in which his autobiographical self somehow became the material of an entire dramatic universe. It seems now that Gray was in practice all these years to...