
 “In February of 1983, I met this amazing British documentary filmmaker….”
These are the opening phrases of “Swimming to Cambodia,” the best-identified do the job of actor and author Spalding Gray, who took his lifetime when he jumped into New York Harbor on a frigid night in January 2004.
But there he was in spirit, in Rochester, on an night in July at the Multi-use Community Cultural Center on Atlantic Avenue, wherever Justin Rielly was breathing lifestyle into Gray and his function.
It was not the to start with time, and it probably will not be the final. There is a kinship involving Rielly and Gray, who never ever achieved in lifetime, but have a bond by way of Gray’s widow and what she describes as their shared struggle to find their place in the world.
Rielly, a 37-yr-aged actor, writer, director, and producer, results in theater via his one particular-guy organization he phone calls Aspie Operates. In August, he was in rehearsals for “Ghost Tale,” a engage in by British playwright Mark Ravenhill that Rielly is directing for performances at the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival this month.
Aspie Functions is a reference to Asperger’s Syndrome. Rielly was diagnosed with it when he was about 23 yrs old, despite the fact that the clinical profession has since reclassified Asperger’s from a individual problem to part of a wide group of autism spectrum problems.
“It’s just one of these issues I found out afterwards in life,” he claims. “But I’m happy I found out it due to the fact, when I was a very little child, I was continually receiving bullied since I felt various from all the other children, and I could by no means figure out why.”
He was certainly unique from other children. “I recall, in a person instance, I could name most likely all the Best Image Academy Award winners from 1927 to a particular period in time,” he claims. “I necessarily mean, that’s a thing that commonly persons would not feel about.”
There are clues to his diagnosis in his behavior. Rielly admits he has to get the job done at generating eye call with people today. He’s an intense conversationalist, meticulously drawing out his ideas from deep within.
But that night at MuCCC undertaking “Swimming to Cambodia,” Rielly was channeling Grey and his relentless stream-of-consciousness retelling of the tiny acting job Grey experienced in the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields.” The film’s setting is genocide in Cambodia, but Gray worked his part into a monologue about filmmaking and some of the edgier factors of Cambodian lifestyle, namely drugs. A few of yrs later, Jonathan Demme turned Gray’s monologue into a movie.
In the course of his efficiency of the often highly effective, often nuanced, from time to time manic a person-person display, Rielly hardly ever glanced at the script. He experienced memorized Gray’s whole 75-moment monologue.
“This is just a random jumble of feelings,” Rielly states of the exhibit. “But however someway when the piece is about, the connections are there. You might not always see them. But at some point, you get to the place exactly where the connections are there.”
Rielly knows about jumbled feelings and locating the connections to make a issue. Of his analysis, he states, “Some of the wires could have ended up in the mistaken position, in the incorrect sockets. But nonetheless they go in and they perform. So I stay.”

 By working day, Rielly will work at a computer software enterprise that assists companies with their on line catering menus. Nothing at all to see listed here. It is theater that is the wild card, with “so quite a few various, jumbled factors,” he says, “that I actually have to place collectively in my head.”
There are limits to what he can do with Aspie Will work. There is no finances for musicals or big casts. Rielly specializes in little-scale productions with minimalist sets that focus on storytelling and figures.
But the storytelling itself does not have to be negligible. “Swimming to Cambodia” opens a doorway to the record of Cambodia by the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Chilly War and expounds on themes of destroying cultural traditions to construct a new society from scratch.
The script describes associates of the Khmer Rouge in vivid fashion:
This strange bunch of rednecks . . . who experienced been educated in Paris in the rigid Maoist doctrine, besides another person threw a perverse minor bit of Rousseau into the soup. This built for a strange bunch of bandits, hanging out in the jungle residing on bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards, currently being experienced by the Vietcong. They experienced a again-to-the land, racist consciousness further than something Hitler had at any time dreamed of. But they experienced no scapegoat other than the town-dwellers of Phnom Penh. They had been like a hundred thousand rednecks rallying in New Paltz, New York, 90 miles above the metropolis, about to march in.
“It’s all in the supply,” Rielly claims of the script. “It’s all in generating the audience be a component of the journey with you.”
Often, another person has to assist open that door. In the case of Rielly, it was the late John Borek, the previous arts director at MuCCC. Reilly remembers Borek observing 1 of Rielly’s before pieces and telling him, “Your do the job truly reminded me of Spalding Grey.”
That comment prodded Rielly to speak to Gray’s widow, Kathleen Russo, as a result of the director of the aged Pyramid Arts Middle in the Anderson Arts Setting up on Goodman Avenue, where by Russo experienced worked whilst she was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology. She granted Rielly permission to conduct “Swimming to Cambodia.”
“It transformed my lifetime,” Rielly claims of that correspondence. “Spalding’s perform type of gave me a new chance to glance at seriously wonderful storytelling. It was a video game-changer for me.”
By the time Grey satisfied Russo, whom he married in 1994, he experienced extensive moved on to later on will work. So when Russo granted Rielly authorization to complete “Swimming to Cambodia,” she had never ever observed her husband’s breakthrough autobiographical monologue done in its entirety — and would not until she arrived to Rochester to see Rielly provide it to existence in 2015.
That night, Rielly walked onstage, stood in front of a audio stand, opened the script, and waited for the proper instant to start out speaking.
“And all I had to do is just look right at Kathy,” Rielly claims. “Her facial expression was practically stating: ‘You have this.’ And, and I just went from there, and I really do not really keep in mind searching at that script at all. I’m guaranteed I did, but I really do not recall seeking at it for prolonged, since I was so dedicated to performing a good job for Kathy. And it plainly moved her.”
So moved was Russo by Rielly’s effectiveness, that she afterwards granted him permission to complete Gray’s “Interviewing the Audience” and “Monster in a Box.”
“I believed he did a marvelous career, genuinely, truly excellent,” Russo claims, speaking by cellphone from her house in Sag Harbor, Lengthy Island. “He’s a true scholar of Spalding Gray. He understands Spalding inside-out, nonetheless does it his possess way, his own edition of it. I just enjoy the friendship that we begun from 6 a long time ago, when he begun to do, publicly, Spalding’s perform.”
“Swimming to Cambodia” was a breakthrough for Grey and Rielly in an additional way, while 1 not evident to their audiences.
“Spalding was dyslexic,” Russo suggests. Dyslexia is a finding out problem that mainly has an effect on looking at skills and locations of the brain that course of action language.
“Not the exact issue (as autism spectrum disorder), obviously, but a sluggish learner, and faculty was tricky for him,” Russo claims. “I’m absolutely sure Justin had his obstructions, as well, so I believe he relates to the wrestle that Spalding had to suit into modern society as a gradual learner.”
Rielly has done Gray’s other is effective, but he keeps coming back again to “Swimming to Cambodia.”
His latest performance in July was a tribute to the return of dwell theater after its pandemic-induced shutdown, and he opened the present with a statement of his possess: “I never know about you, but I’ve missed this.”
The clearly show, he said, “is dedicated to the magic of live theater. It is dedicated to moments wherever actors and audience can arrive collectively for a quick time period of time and just have a wonderful time telling fantastic stories, giving terrific performances — and creating individuals chuckle and cry — that they can just delight in. Hopefully that magic can be correct right here and we get to share this collectively.”
With that arrived a little something else lacking in the absence of theater — the initially of the show’s shared curiosities, a quilt of people, with Rielly’s shipping and delivery of Gray’s opening line:
“In February of 1983, I achieved this remarkable British documentary filmmaker, named Roland Joffe. He was a quite rigorous person. He was a mix of Zorro, Jesus, and Rasputin.”
Jeff Spevak is WXXI’s Arts & Everyday living editor. He can be attained at [email protected].
