In his intensely personal monologues, Spalding Gray talked incessantly about death, and his lifelong obsession with it. With a tone alternately fatalistic and defiant, he spoke of suicide, of incurable illness, and of the various ways in which a human being can slip away from life. Gray always seemed decidedly unbalanced, but his monologues were cathartic in a way which always made one hope that he was exorcising his demons as he laid them before an audience. Now, two weeks after vanishing without a trace from his New York home, the horrible ironies of Gray’s life and work are on display, his uncertain absence a tragically appropriate denouement to a career built on pain.