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IN SEPTEMBER 1978, TWO NIGHTS AFTER I ARRIVE IN New York City to attend graduate school, I find myself in the front row at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street watching Nayatt School. The play is the third part of the Wooster Group's trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island, based on autobiographical incidents in the life of Spalding Gray, who, spiffed up in a white lab coat and tie, is in the cast. The performers are seated precariously along an eight-foot-high ledge facing the risers on which the authence is situated - which places me face-to-face, at a distance that can't be more than four or five feet, with a remarkable actor whose name, I learn later, is Ron Vawter. On a turntable phonograph, Vawter cues up an interlude of mournful classical music- is it Mahler? Richard Strauss?- and dabs his eyes (they are an...