The table is familiar. It’s a simple, functional “Spalding Gray” table, the kind the famed monologist sat behind when he delivered his staged status reports on his neurotic and wildly improbable life. But the young, curly-haired man sitting behind it in the rehearsal hall is not Gray. It’s Ain Gordon, the downtown artist better known as a playwright. And he’s not alone, as Gray always was in solo works from “Sex and Death to Age 14” to his last work, “Life Interrupted.” Surrounding Mr. Gordon are actors Frank Wood, Kathleen Chalfant, and Hazelle Goodman. And surrounding them are stacks and stacks of composition books with black-and-white marbled covers — not the spiral notebooks Gray habitually laid on the table before disclosing his latest collection of innermost thoughts to the audience.

These incongruities aside, the piece being rehearsed is indeed a new Spalding Gray work, but it is the first not to star the author, who leaped off the Staten Island Ferry in January 2004, a suicide at age 62. The work, called “Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell,” which opens March 6, is the final product of two years of development, beginning shortly after Gray’s death.

The seed of the show was first planted in the Spring of 2005, when Theatre Communications Group republished Gray’s most famous work, “Swimming to Cambodia,” and asked Gray’s widow and executor Kathleen Russo to organize a reading of the work at the Union Square Barnes & Noble bookstore. Ms. Russo corralled a few of her late husband’s friends, including writer Roger Rosenblatt, performance artist and playwright Eric Bogosian, and poet Bob Holman. Ms. Russo was so pleased with the results that she decided to put together a similar evening to honor Gray’s 65th birthday, which would have been in June of last year.

Suddenly, the small gathering of friends became something more. Both P.S. 122 and the University of California at Los Angeles signed on for weeklong events. And then P.S. 122 took another step. It recommended Ms. Russo employ then board member Lucy Sexton to work on the project.

“Lucy came in and I said, ‘I’m going to direct it,'” Ms. Russo recalled. “Then she started talking and said, ‘This could have more life; the way you structure it could be more like a play. And why not play around and not just have people behind a table?'” Ms. Russo promptly invited Ms. Sexton to direct the work.

What followed was a process of intense development, beginning with a thorough sifting of the hundreds of journals Gray kept during his life (those composition books are used as both props and scenery in the show). This wasn’t as difficult, though, as it might have been: film director Steven Soderbergh, who is organizing a documentary about Gray, had already had every page transcribed and entered into a computer.

And Ms. Russo wasn’t exactly diving into the project blind. “I didn’t read his journals while he was alive,” she said. “I always felt that was an invasion of his privacy.” Gray’s death, however, changed her mind. “After he died, I literally opened up this closet where he kept them all and started reading them, one a night.” She admits that, even today, she has not gotten through all of the volumes.

The finished script of “Stories Left to Tell” includes sections from Gray’s published monologues, as well as previously undisclosed journal entries and sections of the unfinished “Life Interrupted.” The latter, partial work addresses the details and aftermath of the car accident Gray suffered in summer 2001 when on vacation in Ireland. While driving down a small country road, the writer and four companions, including Ms. Russo, collided with a minivan on a dangerous bend in the lane known locally as “The Black Spot” (the original title of the monologue). The incident left Gray with a broken hip and a fractured skull. He would undergo several operations, but battle physical pain and crippling depression for the remainder of his life. Several suicide attempts preceded his final jump into icy New York Harbor.

The last chronological item used in the script is taken from a tape Gray made in December 2003. During healthier times, he had filled a journal each month. But in the final year of his life, said Ms. Russo, he completed only a single notebook. And finally, he switched from writing to recording. “I actually saw that, foolishly, as a sign that he might be getting better. He walked around endlessly with this tape. He was interviewing our son as they went to school, doing something creative with a tape player. What I didn’t know was when he was alone he was making these other tapes. What they say about people who kill themselves is once they finally decide, they are very clear. It’s like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders. His words are so fluid on the tape that you would never know this was the same person that had been so sick the year before.”

The material is divided among the four actors according to content. Frank Wood recites sections that have to do with Gray’s family life, both as a child growing up in Rhode Island and as a husband and father late in life; Ms. Chalfant is Spalding the Lover; Ms. Goodman is Spalding the Adventurer; and Mr. Gordon takes on the role of narrator. A fifth “secret celebrity” actor, who will change every couple weeks, will handle six sections regarding Gray’s career. In past workshops, this job has been taken by such actors as Richard Gere, Tony Shalhoub, and John C. Reilly.

None of the four steady actors were close to Gray (though Mr. Wood, with his New England twang and rumpled clothes, comes off as Spalding the long-lost brother). That’s fine with Ms. Russo and Ms. Sexton, who hope the show will illustrate that Gray’s work, though intensely personal, can find a home in any performer and need not be consigned to history.

“The big question after Martha Graham died was would this work live on,” said Ms. Sexton. “I think when you hear this, you realize it’s great writing for the stage, great storytelling.” Ms. Russo echoed her desire to extend Gray’s legacy. “I’m just going to make sure that he is not known for this one final act,” she said. “He has this whole body of work from a life that was fully lived.”

In previews. Begins March 6 (Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane, between Bleecker and West 3rd streets, 212-420-8000).