Someone talking for 90 minutes straight is usually a reliable recipe for tedium. But in 1987's Swimming to Cambodia, monologuist Spalding Gray, seeking a ''perfect moment'' and finding it, terrified, in the Indian Ocean, really bucked the trend. Alas, there is no such epiphany in Monster in a Box, which has him ruminating, once again, about personal history and global issues. But this time self-reference has given way to self-fascination.
The title refers to a book manuscript, motivated by his mother's suicide, that lies unfinished while a number of distractions — L.A., Nicaragua, Moscow — get in the way. Not even Gray's puckishness, his rat-a-tat-tat delivery, or his suaveness can camouflage the diffusion of anecdotes that refuse to coalesce into either a narrative or a satisfying alternative. Toward the end, he starts talking about his reviews from a production of Our Town; it's like saying, ''Enough about me. Here's what other people think of me.'' C-
Add your comment
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us. An asterisk * indicates a required field.