Main photo by Joan Marcus.
The Tricky Part written and performed by Martin Moran had its debut Off-Off-Broadway in 2003, and since then has toured through the United States, Canada, South Africa and India. Moran’s memoir of the same title has won numerous honours, including a Barnes and Noble Discover Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Directed by Seth Barrish, who also directs Michael Birbiglia’s The New One.
This one-man show will lift you up, make you cry and leave you wanting to hear more of Martin’s world. The performance opens with the house lights on the audience which served to unify performer and audience. Then the lights start to focus on the stage, and then later solely on Martin to tremendous effect.
Partly billed as an opportunity for healing, the show dives directly into the complex relationship between love, abuse and forgiveness, in which the line between victim and perpetrator aren’t always clear. In the spirit of the film For A Lost Soldier, this coming of age story is a reminder that sometimes the terrible things that happen to us are also the very things that will set us free. As Martin takes us through the intimate beginning of his 3-year sexual ‘relationship’, when he was a 12-year-old boy, with an aspiring seminarian. Graphic in its detail, it drew gasps from the audience, as it was somewhat horrific. Or was it? That’s the tricky part.
Martin is a gifted writer storyteller but his real magic is in how he connects into the audience as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Honest, moving and at times heart-breaking, The Tricky Part is as complex and challenging as it is light-hearted and humorous, and if there’s truth in the saying, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger, Martin is living proof of that. On until December 16 2018.
The Tricky Part
The Barrow Group Mainstage Theatre
312 W 36th St
New York, NY
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