Back From the Dark Territory

Actor Martin Moran had a story inside him, but it was a tale many people wouldn't necessarily be comfortable hearing. So why tell it?

"Well, I asked myself that a lot, particularly at the beginning, because I felt deeply hesitant, to say the least— uncomfortable, nauseous, terrified, doubtful," he says. He has a soft, assured way of speaking—not a single "uh" or "um," no self-conscious stuttering, very few false starts. He can look you in the eye and almost serenely unravel the most tangled answers; you can take notes and easily quote him verbatim.

Considering the subject matter, this is both disarming and astonishing. When Moran was 12, he entered into a sexual relationship with an older counselor from a Catholic boys' camp. It isn't an uncommon experience, unfortunately, but what distinguishes The Tricky Part—both the illuminating memoir he recently published (he'll be at Elliott Bay Book Co. on Monday, July 25; 206-624-6600) and his Obie-winning one-man show now at the Intiman (opening Wednesday, July 20; 206-269-1900)—is Moran's uncommon refusal to view the molestation as a cut-and-dried issue of monstrous abuse. If anything, the book's description of that first sexual encounter is filled with a startling sense of wonder: The young Moran considers stopping the sudden seduction but, as he writes, "I didn't. I allowed. It was as though he was touching me into being and I was dying to find out who I was." It was, he says, a story that wouldn't let go of him, and his persistent inquiry into what seems untenable circumstances will give pause to anyone assuming jaded familiarity with such movie-of-the-week material.

Yet, again, why? Why stand onstage and calmly disembowel your most terrifying secret?

"Why tell any difficult story?" he responds, that same, almost beatific demeanor enveloping his words. "Look, since the beginning of time, there's been this human desire—we sit around a campfire, as a tribe, and tell stories. You've gone to the deep, you've explored dark territory, you went into that forest that nobody knew. And you sit around the fire, and you report to your fellow tribesmen. I think there's just this deep human need to shorten the distance between ourselves, to try to talk about the human experience with one another."

To try to tell someone about The Tricky Part, in either of its incarnations, is to try to tell someone that, no, really, they'll like going to the dentist. Very few people who haven't been molested themselves actively seek out reminiscences by survivors. Moran gets this, but he also believes his story is about more than what's on the surface.

"This is a loaded subject," he acknowledges. "I still feel shame. There'll be something in my hometown newspaper: 'Martin Moran and his play about sexual abuse.' And I still get a little cringe. I think, 'Oh my God, that's me. And I'm writing about that, huh?' But I really do want to say that part of what has allowed me to speak about it is the sense that at the core of the story are eternal kinds of human questions that don't really have to do with sexual abuse—that have to do with the nature and complexity of being human. So there's the difficult narrative, but inside that narrative are much more eternal questions about how we transcend what we think of as damage."

The title of the book and play comes from an episode in Moran's Catholic childhood when a schoolyard punk demands half of Martin's Mars bar, citing the story of St. Martin, who shared his cloak with a beggar who fortuitously turned out to be God.

"I didn't see how, with his mean eyes and snotty nose, Ricky's could be the face of God," Moran writes. "But that's the tricky part."

The book is a lucid, dogged elaboration of the sometimes damning gray area between being a bum and being God; onstage, where it's just Moran, a stool, and a picture of him as a child, the effect must be one of unusual intimacy. It must also, you'd think, unsettle anyone concerned with issues about Moran's sexuality.

"Whenever I speak about it, I try to make clear that I was a being who came into the world essentially gay," says Moran, leading into a discussion of how he approached his dual projects. "This desire, this attraction, this vulnerability was there prior to meeting Bob. So the considerations of how it may push cultural buttons or political buttons really didn't occur to me. All that was occurring to me was this profound, deep desire to try to relay the emotional truth at any given moment of the story—this is how it happened, this is what I felt, this was the Catholic world I lived in, these were my parents, and this was this screwed-up guy, Bob, and he happened to have a girlfriend and he went on to have a child. The guy was a pedophile and also married a woman. It's very complicated."

He started thinking about addressing those complications in the memoir years ago, then saw it transform into a solo show, first in workshops as far back as 2002, then as an experiment at Sundance Theatre Lab with director Seth Barrish. It finally opened off-Broadway in the spring of 2004. Public reaction to the effort has been unexpectedly rewarding, even at its most confrontational.