Although Spalding Gray took his own life in 2004, in a way he had been doing that all along. The monologuist of such tide-turning works as “Swimming to Cambodia” and “It’s a Slippery Slope” had always taken his own life — as material, as muse, as the prime pump of his artistic output. No one could have lived a more “examined life” than he did; no one had obsessed so publicly and eloquently about its shape and inevitable ending. So his suicide didn’t come as a surprise —just as a tragedy.

For the many who had seen his painfully honest admissions of neurotic despair and his correspondingly buoyant ability to rise above it, Spalding Gray was a touchstone. “Stories Left To Tell,” a posthumous compilation of fragments, journal entries, and unpublished work, proves he still is. Yes, the experience feels essentially second-hand — despite the able performances of Kathleen Chalfant, Hazelle Goodman, Ain Gordon, and Frank Wood, we can’t forget that Gray should be speaking, should be boogieing around to his little cassette player, should be the one making us laugh. But as that frustration builds and breaks, the evening makes its point indirectly. More than any devout memorial, “Stories Left To Tell” will make you miss a man you never knew.

The formula, created by Gray’s widow, Kathleen Russo, and director Lucy Sexton, is simple. On a David Korins set, littered with composition notebooks, the four actors lounge or perch. About halfway through, a guest star bounds into view — for the opening night performance, Fisher Stevens did yeoman’s service. Roughly divvying up the writings by theme, each stands and delivers. Mr. Wood tells us about his family, the well-worn, gray-water images of Narragansett Bay and New England. Ms. Chalfant, working a plunging neckline, handles sex and love; the muscular Ms. Goodman gets “adventure,” which become her highly physical enactments of sweat lodges and epic bouts of gas. Mr. Gordon reads journal entries with perhaps a touch too much solemnity, and Mr. Stevens rants charmingly about the trials of professional endeavor, particularly the idiocies of Hollywood and the delights of live performance.

Inevitably, the work stays relatively polite. Although Gray dealt with the ugly breakup of his first marriage in “It’s a Slippery Slope,” here his life with his first wife and then his abandonment move by with discreet brevity. “It’s a Slippery Slope” was a work in which he himself admitted to changing his relationship with his audience, by graduating from an ingratiating persona (he claims to have gotten into confessional performance because he spent so much time trying to make his therapist laugh) to one in which he let audiences judge him as a cad. But while Gray was always willing to speak ill of himself, “Stories Left To Tell” won’t speak ill of the dead.

Of course, from the outset, with the actors giving one another little bucking-up smiles, the show treads gently in Gray’s, well, gray areas. Ms. Sexton and Ms. Russo make sure to temper every expression of anger and despair with 10 revelations of bafflement or delight. Even after the accident that damaged his brain and drove Gray into his final depression (which he related acidly in his unfinished work “Life Interrupted”), only Mr. Wood permits himself a moment of vitriol. Mr. Wood, whose deadpan, airless delivery was the biggest comic success of the evening, spits out some advice taken straight from Gray’s last monologue. “Get the American Express Platinum Card — it’s only three hundred bucks extra — so you can be medevacked the fuck out of a foreign country if you get in an accident.” Many of those who saw Gray’s last performances felt the dangerous tide of negativity in them welling up through his customary wryness. It’s actually a relief then, if a bit of a cop-out, that “Stories Left to Tell” so effectively pulls clear of that tide.

But thanks To Gray, the evening never quite slips into an exercise in affirmation. Even without his impish presence, his texts leave behind careful observations and a surprisingly technical ability with commonplace moments. His performances — as we see in one last elegiac projection at the end — stayed loose and improvisational. But that casual affect was only an affect. His stripped-down staging and takeme-as-I-am attitude concealed a man of real theatrical savvy and storytelling craft. On a night preoccupied with his death, it’s nice to realize just how long his writing may live.

Open run ( 18 Minetta Lane, between Bleecker and West 3rd streets, 212-420-8000).