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	For This Actor, 'The Tricky Part' Is Learning to Accept and Forgive By Louise Kennedy Boston Globe [Boston MA] August 14, 2005 Martin Moran radiates an almost palpable light. He seems filled with joy, with generosity, with what a person from his Catholic schooling can only call grace. And he seems this way even as he is talking about the most torturously complex events of his life: the three years, beginning when he was 12, when he was sexually involved with a Colorado camp counselor named Bob, who was more than twice his age. In a memoir recently published by Beacon Press and in a play that opens at Shakespeare & Company on Tuesday -- both called "The Tricky Part" -- Moran talks about the damage this relationship caused, the kind of damage that has received wide attention with the Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal. But he also explores the ways in which, even as it wounded him, it shaped him into the person he is now. The play -- like the story, the history, the life itself -- is complex. And in its complexity lies a deep and troubling kind of truth. "The journey toward trying to figure it out is the complicated journey toward forgiveness," Moran says. Then he offers a definition of forgiveness that he heard somewhere along the path of his own journey: "Forgiveness is the complete letting go of the hope of having had a different or a better past." At 45, Moran notes that it takes years to reach that point. For his own part, though he was just 15 when he broke off contact with Bob -- who would later go to prison for abusing another boy -- he spent decades insisting, if he talked about Bob at all, that what happened between them was no big deal, not abuse, just something wild he did when he was younger. Meanwhile, though, he was engaging in compulsive, anonymous sex, sometimes with much younger men, carrying on a whole secret life that he kept not just from his family but from his partner of 20 years, fellow actor Henry Stram. Finally, gradually, with encouragement from Stram and other friends, he started looking at what he had done with Bob and what it had done to him. He started acknowledging, as he puts it, that "it's not nothing." But he also continued, even as he began to write about it, to believe that it was not as simple as the word "abuse" made it sound. "The subject is so tough," Moran says. "People ask me, 'Are you over it?' The answer is no. But I could never have been the person I am without it. Part of the legacy is exactly that complication. . . . It's discovering you can hold both things at once: pain and beauty. The thing that you thought destroyed you also made you who you are." Moran worked hard to convey that paradox as he told his story, first in the pages that became his book and then, at the urging of his New York neighbor Seth Barrish, in a one-man play. When he read an early draft of the memoir to Barrish, Moran recalls, "In a very craftlike way, he just looked at me and said, 'This is important.' I said, 'No, no, no, I'm writing a book. It's too intimate.' He said, 'Why does it have to be either/or?' " So Moran developed the play, and Barrish directed it -- first for tiny audiences at 12 late-night shows, then off-Broadway. Then it won a 2004 Obie Award. Moran, who has appeared in many Broadway plays (including "Titanic," "Cabaret," "Bells Are Ringing," and "Floyd Collins") has been taking "The Tricky Part" around the country ever since; he's also working on a screenplay. He recently performed the play in Seattle, but perhaps the most challenging venue was Denver: his hometown. "That was tricky," he says, and laughs at his choice of word. Elsewhere, "people experience it as a piece of work," he says, "but in Denver it just was much more tribal. People were much more interested in facts." Indeed, one Denver newspaper printed Bob's full name, a name Moran doesn't use in the book and only recently has spoken onstage, and took the playwright to task for not condemning his abuser. "They wrote, 'Why is he still protecting his perpetrator?' " Moran says. " 'Where's the anger?' " He has a simple answer: "I'm trying to write a song. A piece of art. I want it to sing." But it's not that he's never been angry. "There were times when total anger and total anxiety and depression were at the forefront," Moran says. "The physical feeling of the anger -- the sense of a wall being in front of my face -- I felt stuck. The anger was there. But what I desired to bring to the table, to the conversation about this difficult subject, was inquiry." And it's that spirit, says Shakespeare & Company artistic director Tina Packer, that made her want to bring "The Tricky Part" to Lenox. "I wanted the play because it felt more complex and therefore more true," Packer says. "It's full of the nuance, the detail, of how complex these things are. Don't make it sound as if I'm in any way condoning abuse, because I'm not. But somehow we've got to get further. The right/wrong, good/bad stuff doesn't fix it. It's like 'Just say no to drugs.' How can you redirect it? How can you stop it? I just felt that Marty does it so compassionately and so honestly." Moran's compassion even suffuses his description of his sole meeting with Bob as an adult. In 2002, he had somewhat impulsively written a note that was eventually forwarded to a veterans' hospital in Los Angeles, where Bob, by now aging and diabetic, was recovering from the partial amputation of his foot. To Moran's surprise, Bob called -- while Moran happened to be in LA. Moran went to see him in the hospital. "There was this moment," he says, "when I looked at this guy in the wheelchair, and I thought, 'You are so beside the point.' " For all the pain, he says -- and he does call what happened "this intense violation" -- Bob also gave him some sense of connection to another human being at a difficult time in his life, when his parents were moving toward divorce. "It's like he was a life preserver. And he was a criminal," Moran says. It's an example of what he calls "the coincidence of contradictories," a phrase drawn from the epigraph by the 15th-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusathat that opens both play and book. "The more keenly we're aware of the complexity of being human, the more fully we're here in the present," he says. "It's in ambiguity and complexity that we really awaken to being human." And it's in telling his story, Moran says, that he has found his own kind of transcendence. Though he's not a practicing Catholic now, he finds himself using Catholic language to talk about his work. "I experience the play as very priestly. I'm really trying to answer a calling," he says. "The process of writing has brought me so much more squarely into the present. I've come to think of grace as consciousness. Being awake. I'm so much more awake now, to both the pain and the joy."