BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
By Louise Kennedy, Globe Staff | 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."