DARK TIME:

Police Tracing Clues in Spalding Gray Case (JAMES BARRON, 1/14/04, NY Times)

The theatrical monologist Spalding Gray was reported missing after he failed to arrive at a friend's home on Saturday evening and then failed to board a flight at La Guardia Airport the next morning, the police said yesterday.

His wife, Kathleen Russo, reported him missing on Sunday night. Yesterday, the police released a description of what he was wearing when he was last seen - a gray jacket with a blue scarf, a brown sweater, black corduroy pants and brown shoes - and said they had been checking hospitals in New York City and Long Island.

Mr. Gray, 62, has a history of depression and was badly hurt in a car crash in Ireland in 2001. Mark Russell, the executive artistic director at Performance Space 122 on the Lower East Side, said Mr. Gray appeared there from early October to mid-December in "Interrupting Life," a monologue about the accident and his life since then. (A car in which he and Ms. Russo were riding was hit by a van, and he was taken to Dublin for an operation on his fractured hip.)

"He was a man in transition," Mr. Russell said. "I think he was rehabilitating himself on stage through the act of performing and working on this piece. He had a very, very dark time in the fall of '02. We thought that he might not come out of that. It was energizing to see him pulling himself back up."

Whatever happened to institutionalizing people who are a threat to themselves?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2004 2:15 PM