Through Aspie Works, Justin Rielly presents great storytelling on stage | Theater

“In February of 1983, I satisfied this amazing British documentary filmmaker….”

These are the opening words and phrases of “Swimming to Cambodia,” the greatest-recognised operate of actor and writer Spalding Gray, who took his existence when he jumped into New York Harbor on a frigid night time in January 2004.

But there he was in spirit, in Rochester, on an night in July at the Multi-use Neighborhood Cultural Center on Atlantic Avenue, where by Justin Rielly was respiratory existence into Gray and his operate.

It was not the to start with time, and it likely won’t be the past. There is a kinship concerning Rielly and Gray, who never satisfied in existence, but have a bond by way of Gray’s widow and what she describes as their shared battle to uncover their location in the earth.

Rielly, a 37-calendar year-outdated actor, writer, director, and producer, generates theater by way of his one-male company he calls Aspie Will work. In August, he was in rehearsals for “Ghost Story,” a perform by British playwright Mark Ravenhill that Rielly is directing for performances at the KeyBank Rochester Fringe Pageant this month.

Aspie Will work is a reference to Asperger’s Syndrome. Rielly was diagnosed with it when he was about 23 many years outdated, although the health care career has since reclassified Asperger’s from a different problem to component of a wide class of autism spectrum problems.

“It’s one of these issues I uncovered later in existence,” he claims. “But I’m happy I uncovered it since, when I was a minimal child, I was continually acquiring bullied since I felt various from all the other young children, and I could never figure out why.”

He was certainly various from other young children. “I don’t forget, in one instance, I could name likely all the Very best Image Academy Award winners from 1927 to a particular period in time,” he claims. “I necessarily mean, which is a little something that typically individuals wouldn’t assume about.”

There are clues to his analysis in his conduct. Rielly admits he has to operate at creating eye make contact with with individuals. He’s an intensive conversationalist, thoroughly drawing out his feelings from deep inside of.

But that night time at MuCCC doing “Swimming to Cambodia,” Rielly was channeling Gray and his relentless stream-of-consciousness retelling of the smaller acting part Gray 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 areas of Cambodian lifestyle, particularly medication. A pair of many years later, Jonathan Demme turned Gray’s monologue into a movie.

All through his functionality of the in some cases highly effective, in some cases nuanced, in some cases manic one-male show, Rielly almost never glanced at the script. He experienced memorized Gray’s overall seventy five-minute monologue.

“This is just a random jumble of feelings,” Rielly claims of the show. “But however in some way when the piece is more than, the connections are there. You may possibly not always see them. But eventually, you get to the issue where by the connections are there.”

Rielly appreciates about jumbled feelings and obtaining the connections to make a issue. Of his analysis, he claims, “Some of the wires may possibly have ended up in the wrong location, in the wrong sockets. But however they go in and they operate. So I live.”

By day, Rielly functions at a program company that helps corporations with their on the internet catering menus. Nothing to see here. It is theater that is the wild card, with “so a lot of various, jumbled factors,” he claims, “that I actually have to place together in my head.”

There are boundaries to what he can do with Aspie Will work. There is no price range for musicals or huge casts. Rielly specializes in smaller-scale productions with minimalist sets that aim on storytelling and people.

But the storytelling by itself does not have to be minimum. “Swimming to Cambodia” opens a doorway to the record of Cambodia by way of the increase of the Khmer Rouge and the Chilly War and expounds on themes of destroying cultural traditions to develop a new modern society from scratch.

The script describes members of the Khmer Rouge in vivid fashion:

This bizarre bunch of rednecks . . . who experienced been educated in Paris in the strict Maoist doctrine, apart from an individual threw a perverse minimal little bit of Rousseau into the soup. This manufactured for a weird bunch of bandits, hanging out in the jungle dwelling on bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards, being skilled by the Vietcong. They experienced a back again-to-the land, racist consciousness outside of nearly anything Hitler experienced ever dreamed of. But they experienced no scapegoat other than the city-dwellers of Phnom Penh. They were like a hundred thousand rednecks rallying in New Paltz, New York, ninety miles over the city, about to march in.

“It’s all in the delivery,” Rielly claims of the script. “It’s all in creating the viewers be a component of the journey with you.”

Sometimes, an individual has to aid open that doorway. In the scenario of Rielly, it was the late John Borek, the former arts director at MuCCC. Reilly remembers Borek seeing one of Rielly’s before parts and telling him, “Your operate actually reminded me of Spalding Gray.”

That remark prodded Rielly to make contact with Gray’s widow, Kathleen Russo, by way of the director of the outdated Pyramid Arts Center in the Anderson Arts Setting up on Goodman Avenue, where by Russo experienced worked while she was a university student at Rochester Institute of Technology. She granted Rielly permission to execute “Swimming to Cambodia.”

“It modified my existence,” Rielly claims of that correspondence. “Spalding’s operate variety of gave me a new option to glimpse at actually fantastic storytelling. It was a recreation-changer for me.”

By the time Gray satisfied Russo, whom he married in 1994, he experienced long moved on to later functions. So when Russo granted Rielly permission to execute “Swimming to Cambodia,” she experienced never noticed her husband’s breakthrough autobiographical monologue performed in its entirety — and wouldn’t until eventually she arrived to Rochester to see Rielly deliver it to existence in 2015.

That night time, Rielly walked onstage, stood in front of a songs stand, opened the script, and waited for the proper second to begin speaking.

“And all I experienced to do is just glimpse proper at Kathy,” Rielly claims. “Her facial expression was pretty much saying: ‘You have this.’ And, and I just went from there, and I do not actually don’t forget hunting at that script at all. I’m positive I did, but I do not recall hunting at it for long, since I was so fully commited to accomplishing a fantastic career for Kathy. And it clearly moved her.”

So moved was Russo by Rielly’s functionality, that she later granted him permission to execute Gray’s “Interviewing the Audience” and “Monster in a Box.”

“I considered he did a wonderful career, actually, actually fantastic,” Russo claims, speaking by mobile phone from her household in Sag Harbor, Lengthy Island. “He’s a true scholar of Spalding Gray. He appreciates Spalding within-out, however does it his very own way, his very own version of it. I just respect the friendship that we started off from 6 many years ago, when he started off to do, publicly, Spalding’s operate.”

“Swimming to Cambodia” was a breakthrough for Gray and Rielly in one more way, while one not apparent to their audiences.

“Spalding was dyslexic,” Russo claims. Dyslexia is a discovering dysfunction that largely impacts examining expertise and parts of the mind that process language.

“Not the exact matter (as autism spectrum dysfunction), clearly, but a sluggish learner, and college was challenging for him,” Russo claims. “I’m positive Justin experienced his road blocks, also, so I assume he relates to the battle that Spalding experienced to fit into modern society as a sluggish learner.”

Rielly has performed Gray’s other functions, but he retains coming back again to “Swimming to Cambodia.”

His hottest functionality in July was a tribute to the return of live theater just after its pandemic-induced shutdown, and he opened the show with a assertion of his very own: “I do not know about you, but I have missed this.”

The show, he reported, “is dedicated to the magic of live theater. It is dedicated to moments where by actors and viewers can appear together for a short period of time and just have a excellent time telling fantastic tales, offering fantastic performances — and creating individuals laugh and cry — that they can just appreciate. Hopefully that magic can be proper here and we get to share this together.”

With that arrived a little something else missing in the absence of theater — the to start with of the show’s shared curiosities, a quilt of people, with Rielly’s delivery of Gray’s opening line:

“In February of 1983, I satisfied this amazing British documentary filmmaker, named Roland Joffe. He was a incredibly intensive male. He was a mix of Zorro, Jesus, and Rasputin.”

Jeff Spevak is WXXI’s Arts & Everyday living editor. He can be achieved at [email protected].