Spalding Gray

''It's very hard for me,'' he said, ''not to tell everybody everything.''

This talent was perhaps never better displayed than in ''Swimming to Cambodia,'' his 1984 monologue in which his experiences playing a small role in the movie ''The Killing Fields'' became a jumping-off point for exploring the history and culture of war in Southeast Asia. That monologue was turned into a film, directed by Jonathan Demme, in 1987.

''Swimming'' may have been Mr. Gray's most famous work, but for 25 years, he turned out a consistent stream of well-received pieces on subjects as varied as writing (''Monster in a Box,'' 1990) and illness (''Gray's Anatomy,'' 1993), to less weighty issues like learning to ski (''It's a Slippery Slope,'' 1996) and performing while high on LSD.

His relentless self-absorption drew a broad range of audiences at Broadway-size theaters like the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center (where he produced four shows during the 1990's) to downtown spaces like the Performing Garage and P.S. 122.

While his performances resembled -- and influenced -- the confessional style of contemporaries like Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo, Mr. Gray's work had a search for larger meaning -- a quest, as he put it, for ''the perfect moment.''

The monologues were also often, for the record, painfully funny.

''He is a sit-down monologuist with the comic sensibility of a stand-up comedian,'' Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times while reviewing the 1981 show ''47 Beds,'' a chronicle of all the places Mr. Gray had slept. ''He describes in vivid detail his search for self-discovery, and then laughs at himself and needles nirvana.''

One of three sons, Mr. Gray was born on June 5, 1941, in Barrington, R.I. His father was a factory worker and his mother a homemaker; Mr. Gray referred to himself as ''a Rhode Island WASP,'' raised in a house he depicted as rife with repression, depression and all kinds of neuroses. His mother, Elizabeth Gray, committed suicide in 1967.

Mr. Gray, tall and lanky with an awkward charm, began acting in high school; by his mid-20's he had a modest career on the regional theater circuit. In 1967, he moved to New York, and three years later joined the director Richard Schechner's influential experimental troupe, the Performance Group. In 1975, he left to help found the Wooster Group, an experimental company based at the Performing Garage, a converted flatware factory on Wooster Street in SoHo. Mr. Gray had dated the group's director, Elizabeth LeCompte, and kept an apartment in the same building on Wooster Street as Ms. LeCompte and Willem Dafoe, another group member. And Mr. Gray and Ms. LeCompte turned out a trilogy of plays based on his memories of childhood in Rhode Island.

But by 1979, Mr. Gray had decided to pursue the monologue as a type of performance art, and soon hit on his basic set (desk, water, notes) and approach (simple, measured, candid). His first piece, ''Sex and Death to the Age 14,'' told the story of just that, setting an autobiographical tone that continued throughout his career, including such self-explanatory titles as ''Booze, Cars and College Girls,'' and ''India (and After),'' the story of a Performance Group tour to India.

In recent years his monologues became more personal, however. ''Morning, Noon and Night,'' in 1999, examined his adventures in fatherhood, and many who saw his final piece, ''Life Interrupted,'' considered it his darkest work yet.

In addition to film versions of several of his monologues, Mr. Gray appeared in nearly 40 movies, including ''True Stories'' (1986), ''Beaches'' (1988), ''The Paper'' (1994) and ''Beyond Rangoon'' (1995); he also appeared on Broadway in 1988 as the Stage Manager in ''Our Town,'' and in 2000 as a political candidate in ''Gore Vidal's The Best Man.''

In a 1980 show, Mr. Gray spoke a line that may well have summed up his life and career. ''It's very hard for me,'' he said, ''not to tell everybody everything.''