Voices: Shades of Gray

This weekend's production of "Peter Pan" at Marywood University was not the first I had seen, but it was the first time I thought about Mrs. Darling as the mother of missing children.

In a scene just before Wendy, Michael and John returned from Neverland, Mrs. Darling looked at the nursery dog Nana with resignation. "They're never coming back," she said in a shockingly matter of fact tone.

Her character could get away with saying that, I supposed, because everyone in the audience knows very well the kids are going to fly through the window any minute. And besides, we had all just made it perfectly clear that we did believe in fairies, so nothing bad could really happen. I thought that maybe Mrs. Darling believed, too. That somewhere inside she was desperately thinking they'd return. There just wasn't enough room for both her and Mr. Darling to hide in the doghouse, so she chose to carry on.

Ever-tempted to connect the seemingly disparate things that distract me, the missing Darling children brought Spalding Gray to mind. His disappearance was announced in mid-January and I've been obsessed since.

The autobiographical monologist -- sometimes considered performance artist -- better known by the general public for his roles in such films as "Beaches" and "Kate & Leopold," has long inspired me. In the late '90s, I heard him speak at the University of Arizona after a screening of his film "Monster in Box." I'm not one to be star struck, but I forced myself to put fear aside and ask a question during the Q&A just to have a moment of connection. I felt like an idiot when he seemed unsure what to say about the future of live theatre, but still pleased I has asked.

Only a handful of people I've spoken to have heard of Spalding Gray, so I won't bore you with my fixation.

You're probably more concerned with the disappearance of Phylicia Thomas, the 22-year-old Lake Township woman who's been missing since February 11.

Or the fact that within six weeks, four women have been found strangled near Philadelphia's Kensington Avenue corridor.

I felt guilty when I read about those women this week. Chances are Gray killed himself. Almost everyone thinks so - he's been suicidal for years and obsessed with death since childhood. We'll either hear about his body being dragged from New York Harbor or, some time next year, he'll annouce a new production and we'll realize he must have come home. But it's absolutely terrifying to contemplate what might have happened to Thomas.

Worse yet is that my distraction with these missing people isn't even about the actual people. It's about the idea of people disappearing. Just suddenly being gone. Not dead, necessarily, but mysteriously without certain status.

It wasn't Gray or Thomas haunting me. They were jusy symbols put forth by my subconscious. It was the people I've loved now absent from my life that were haunting me. Friends from college busy living in New York City. My grandparents in Tucson, Arizona. My father and my brothers in Alabama. These people are missing from my life and therefore I miss them. One of the few New Year's resolutions I made was to be more communicative with these people, but it's been hard. In order to pick up the pen or the telephone, I have to accept the fact that they might never walk literally back into my physical world again.

Simultaneously, I'm often overwhelmed by the friendships I've formed during the past four years in Scranton with so many amazingly talented and beautifully-souled people. I exhaust myself some weeks running around to see as many of them as possible. But in retrospect, I'm always pleased I'vemade the effort. Just like I was glad I asked Spalding Gray that question years ago.

We can't control when people will enter or exit our lives. Our choice is only whether we will gather the guts to ask that question; to connect, if only for one potentially awkward moment, before they disappear from our lives.

--alicia grega-pikul, 26 February 2004