Morning, Noon and Night
Spalding Gray is a pig. Charming, articulate, funny, but a pig. So what? you might ask. You’re not married to him. Oh, but I am (or was for 25 years, until my husband’s death two years ago–and no, I did not murder him, much as I would have liked to on occasion). Countless American women are married to Spalding Gray: the assumptions about gender roles he makes in his insidiously attractive new monologue, Morning, Noon and Night, are pervasive in men of a certain age and class–assumptions that strangle women’s creative lives.
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Kathie went through her pregnancy and the birth of their child, Forrest, alone. Gray didn’t even see the boy until he was eight months old. Then he had a change of heart, left his wife, and moved in with Kathie, her daughter Marissa, and Forrest. He didn’t marry her, though they had another unplanned child, Theo, about four years after Forrest was born. Morning, Noon and Night details one day–October 8, 1997–in their lives in the affluent community of Sag Harbor on Long Island, when Marissa was ten, Forrest five, and Theo nine months.
You may say that whether Kathie Russo decides to live with Spalding Gray is her business and has no bearing on the piece. But the fact is that Gray casts us, the audience, in Kathie’s role: We sit silently in the dark. We have no lines. We have no character. We fulfill Gray’s needs and have none of our own–we listen to his stories, laugh at his jokes. A proscenium stage with a chattering, gesticulating man on it makes Kathies of us all, as we gather round the alpha male holding forth at a party of his own making.
