The new off-Broadway piece “All the Rage” starts off with a diffident man in a pale-blue button-down shirt giving out a few words of welcome. He concludes his brief speech with a meek request for the audience to turn off their phones. That’s not a stage manager who wandered onstage, though, but the writer and star of the show, Martin Moran.
In less than a minute, he has established the tone of his new solo outing: conversational, unassuming.
“I’m dying to tell you about this dream I had,” Moran begins, “but first, let me tell you about the fight I had with my father’s wife.”
That story is the first of several loosely related ones that unfurl before we eventually get to the dream. All of them are autobiographical, as was Moran’s breakthrough hit, 2004’s “The Tricky Part” — directed, like “All the Rage,” by Seth Barrish.
In that earlier show, Moran recounted how he had been abused by a counselor at a Catholic summer camp from age 12 to 15. Now 52, the mild-mannered, openly gay actor seems at peace with himself and what happened to him. He’s even invited to participate in a panel titled “How To Forgive the Unforgivable.”
But maybe all’s not well, and here Moran deals with how to negotiate catharsis, asking himself one key question: “Where is my anger?”
Two of the main threads revolve around hardship and Africa. One involves Moran translating for Siba, an asylum-seeker who endured torture in his native African country. Another is about Moran’s trip to Johannesburg and the people he met there.
Barrish has skillfully staged the show as if we were in an old-timey classroom — a blackboard, maps, a projector — and Moran is a charming storyteller.
Still, while he looks aw-shucks off the cuff, he’s also an experienced actor with Broadway credits that include musicals like “Spamalot.” He’s in full control.
So it takes a little while to register that Moran’s circuitous path to inner peace sounds a lot like the usual tale of the Westerner learning valuable lessons from long-suffering — but wise! — Africans. Ironically, at one point he mentions a woman who breaks from reading “Eat Pray Love” to yell back at a subway ranter.
As good as he is, even Moran can’t find a way to make a trip to the Statue of Liberty with Siba less than cloying. By the time we hear about the dream, it’s an anticlimax. It’s tough to find a satisfying end to a show about a quest for closure.