The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. In 1966, Spalding Gray acted in it in upstate New York. He later spoke of being especially interested in Celia, a character who is ‘articulate about her “madness”. For me, she was a fantasy of what my mother might have been had she had the intellectual distance to articulate her nervous breakdown.’ Gray’s mother killed herself in 1967. Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte intertwined his memories with Eliot’s play to devise the third part of Three Places in Rhode Island , a trilogy based on Gray’s life. Nayatt School was first performed by the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage in New York in 1978. ‘Autobiography gives way to farce,’ Jim O’Quinn wrote in his review for American Theatre . ‘But Gray’s personal history is the trilogy’s anchor.’ That history continued with Gray’s monologues – Monster in a Box , Sex and Death , Swimming to Cambodia – and ended when he jumped into New York Harbor in 2004.…