Interviewing the Audience
Seventeen years ago, when the Kitchen commissioned Spalding Gray’s Interviewing the Audience, the piece probably had an electric effect. The New York performance scene was revving up for its last great gasp, and Gray had carved himself an impressive niche as a confessional monologuist. In the days before Oprah and her flock had bludgeoned the national psyche with trivialities masquerading as pressing issues, turning the microphone on the audience may well have seemed radical, even liberating. Without the intimidating celebrity aura that now envelops Gray, it’s easy to imagine that the audience members he invited onstage for “nonagenda talking” felt relatively at ease–or at least as though they were talking to someone not unlike themselves.
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But almost two decades later Gray is a star, everyone and his or her cousin has been on Ricki Lake, and the once-gutsy performance-art world has been domesticated by a few hundred confessional monologuists riding on Gray’s coattails. Interviewing a handful of audience members these days seems about as daring as an astronaut blasting off in the space shuttle. There are real risks, to be sure, but media saturation has made them seem banal. And anyway, won’t people do just about anything these days for their 15 minutes of fame? Why should Gray encourage them? And why should the rest of us watch?
Gray spends little time with formulaic questions (“What do you do for a living?” “What do you do for fun?”), instead encouraging the interviewees to create intimate portraits of themselves out of seemingly pedestrian details. An older gentleman told us he hasn’t sworn at another person in seven years and that he’s already arranged his own cremation because “it’s the sensible thing to do.” A young woman who peppered her speech with the words “golly,” “gee,” and “swell” told us she just quit her job as a circus clown, had lunch with her mother in Indiana, and thinks it would be “neat” to fall in love. These people become charming literary adaptations of themselves.
