Monster in a Box

For some time now, writer-actor-performance artist Spalding Gray has been carrying around with him a monster: a manuscript of a novel called Impossible Vacation, a book that at last sighting weighed in at about 1,800 pages. Monster in a Box, Gray's latest monologue, is a guided tour between the stations of his writing block, which include a field trip to Nicaragua, a disastrous guest appearance at the Moscow film festival, and a stint in Los Angeles hunting down the fabled few who have never written a screenplay. Hilarious and poignant, Monster in a Box is further proof that Gray has not only captured the dangerous spirit of our age but swallowed it whole.

Spalding Gray was born and raised in Rhode Island. A cofounder of the acclaimed New York City theater company the Wooster Group, he appeared on Broadway and in numerous films, including Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, David Byrne’s True Stories, Garry Marshall’s Beaches, and as the subject of the 2010 Steven Soderbergh documentary, And Everything is Going Fine. His monologues include Sex and Death to the Age 14, Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, Gray’s Anatomy, and It’s a Slippery Slope. He died in 2004.