Martin Moran has one of the most envied—and fun—jobs on Broadway. He’s been hamming it up since April as Sir Robin (the Not-Quite-So-Brave-As-Sir-Lancelot) in the Tony Award-winning musical Spamalot, based on the cult-classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Moran, ’82, says it’s a mystery to him why he got the part. “I just met [director] Mike Nichols for five minutes, and somehow he wanted me in Spamalot.”
The fit, sandy-blond actor with a ready smile says he “can’t take credit” and attributes winning the part to “a larger orchestration,” but his résumé shows a respectable two-decade career in Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, regional theater productions, national tours, films and TV. And Moran’s vocal and piano-playing skills in Spamalot’s act-two number “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway” belie the song’s title.
The surprise is that the guy who goofs around in the Pythons’ send-up of the King Arthur legend (and of various showbiz icons) won a 2004 Obie award for his poignant one-man play, The Tricky Part, based on his confessional book of the same name. Subtitled One Boy’s Fall from Trespass into Grace, the memoir reveals that at age 12, Moran was molested by a 30-year-old man he calls simply Bob, who ran a boys’ summer camp in the Rockies outside Denver, Moran’s hometown.
Although the three-year relationship ended in a confrontation just before Bob went to prison for molesting another camper, guilt over his own part in the liaison haunted Moran for years. He attempted suicide twice while in high school—once ingesting a large, random collection of pills (including his sister’s acne medication and his mother’s sleeping tablets), another time shooting his dad’s .22 rifle through the banister of the basement staircase instead of into himself.
Moran says an offhand comment his sister made about his “loud” voice rescued him. “No one in my family sings,” he says. “It just came up. I had this voice. I feel like that saved my life, the fact that I could sing.” He began performing in high school musicals, and kept postponing plans to end his life so he could act in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (after which he began voice lessons), then in Oliver! and in a citywide production of West Side Story.
When he entered Stanford, his “dream college,” as a scholarship student, Moran planned to major in political science and become a senator. “I thought it was a path to being a politically effective person, to change the world, and also to make a good living,” he says. Instead, he performed in Gaieties and Ram’s Head productions, took voice lessons from Evelyn Draper and studied dance with Juan Valenzuela. He left Stanford after two years and received his MFA in acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.
After graduation, Moran moved to New York and debuted on Broadway in the 1984 revival of Oliver! playing a Londoner and the Pieman. His first Off-Broadway appearance came the following year in The Making of Americans, a Gertrude Stein-inspired opera, where he met actor Henry Stram, his partner ever since. Moran’s first big Broadway role was Huckleberry Finn in a musical called Big River; he also played in Titanic, Bells Are Ringing and Cabaret. He has worked in fringe and experimental theater with avant-garde artists such as Meredith Monk and at storied New York venues like P.S. 122 and La MaMa Theatre.
Through it all, Moran’s past kept a tight grip on him. In the memoir, he describes compulsively seeking out strangers in public bathrooms and parks, behavior that brought him to a men’s self-help group for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Although he rarely spoke of his childhood trauma, he began writing The Tricky Part about 10 years ago. In 2002, a one-hour reading from the book that he agreed to do for a festival in Michigan morphed into a one-man theater piece. Following workshops at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory, Moran opened the play Off-Broadway in 2004. Since then he’s toured the country; next April, he has a four-week run at the Signature Theater in Washington, D.C. The book was published by Beacon Press in 2005, and by Anchor Books in paperback this year. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Belles Lettres and the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction.
Moran found the performances hard at first. “I felt really nauseous and frightened,” he recalls. “I kept wanting to stop doing it. But have you found this in life—where something takes on a life larger than you? It began to feel like it had a place, and could help people.”
Winning the Obie and receiving nominations for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards—and great reviews—seemed to confirm that. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called the play “a quiet victory... a remarkably coherent yet complicated firsthand perspective.” He concluded: “Mr. Moran may say he has yet to let go of the wounded child he was. But there is surely some redemption in rendering chaos with this kind of clarity.”
In the book, Moran’s “fall into grace” comes when, after almost 30 years, he tracks down Bob and finds an old man with a partly amputated foot, confined to a wheelchair in an L.A. veterans’ hospital. In finding the courage to confront his molester and in some measure to forgive both Bob and himself, Moran confirms the possibility of redemption.
Thinking a little harder about landing the Spamalot role during a lull in his Tricky Part tour, he says, “The reason I got this job is that the gift of writing my book and the gift of doing my play is the gift of putting me more squarely into the present. The past had me by the throat, and working on the play took it out of my throat. I feel much more in the present—and I feel like that’s what Mike Nichols recognized in me.”
The advice Nichols gives to the Spamalot cast—“Be yourself, and the material will take you the rest of the way”—seems applicable to both of Moran’s recent roles. “The thing I’m loving right now,” he says, “is that doing The Tricky Part was so involved with myself—the history of myself, the story of myself—but this is the dancing, singing, wildly comic, crazy self.”
LAURA SHIN is a writer in New York City.
