[Editors] Alum's "spellbinding" performance -- ONE SHOW ONLY -- Sat. June 16, 7:30pm

[Michael Mack]

Hey gang,
a little self promo for my new solo show -- this 
Saturday 6/16 at the Paulist Center on Park Street in downtown Boston, 7:30pm.

I'd be delighted if you could make it!     Details below.....
Warmly,
Michael

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Catholic Paulist Center hosts "Conversations"
Tackles tough subject while being "funny, fond-hearted, and even comforting."

On Saturday, June 16th at 7:30pm, the Paulist 
Center Catholic Church community, located at 5 
Park Street in downtown Boston, hosts 
"Conversations with My Molester: a Journey of 
Faith" written and performed by MIT alumnus 
Michael Mack. www.michaelmacklive.com

Called "spellbinding... an amazing story of 
forgiveness" by the Cambridge Chronicle, the play 
premiered at Boston University's Boston 
Playwrights Theatre in January directed by Daniel Gidron.

The play opens with Mack as an 11-year old 
Catholic boy dreaming of becoming a priest. That 
dream ends when the pastor of his North Carolina 
church invites him to the rectory to help with "a project."

Mack and his family leave the Church. But decades 
later, with Mack now living in Massachusetts, he 
learns that his abuser lives just miles away, and 
he lands on his former pastor's doorstep.

What happens next sparks a remarkable series of 
events that lead Mack back to the Catholic Church.

"Powerful," says Barbara Thorp, Director of the 
Office of Pastoral Support and Child Protection 
for the Archdiocese of Boston. "An intimate and 
deeply personal journey of profound suffering and 
redemption. We all should have the courage of a 
Michael Mack to delve into the dark corners of 
one’s life story resolved to seek the face of mercy and hope."

"It pierces one’s heart," says Father James 
Savage, parochial vicar at St. Paul Catholic 
Parish where Mack is a parishioner. "I think that 
what he tried to do was on the one hand show the 
darkness of what had happened with him, and at 
the same time show his journey to find a way to 
deal with it, which led eventually to his spiritual healing."

The play marks the 10-year anniversary of 
Boston's clergy sexual abuse crisis, which broke 
in 2002 and has subsequently surged worldwide sparking unprecedented reforms.

In his rave review, Daniel Gewertz, onetime 
theater critic for the Boston Herald, emphasizes 
that the play is not what you'd expect:

"From the title of Michael Mack's extraordinary 
one-man play, 'Conversations With My Molester,' 
one might think this work is all about explicit 
confrontation. But the conversations in Michael 
Mack's play are often inward, and the 
confrontations, while brave, are more concerned with revelation than anger.

"Mack does not shy away from the disturbing 
elements of his experiences as an 11 year-old 
victim of a priest's sexual crimes, yet this 
picture of a man rediscovering his past also 
manages to be funny, fond-hearted and even 
comforting. It is about how power corrupts and 
destroys in the outward world, but it is also a 
work that never forgets the inner self, and the 
big journey that self it is capable of undertaking."

Mack’s poetry career began at MIT. While a 
student at the Sloan School of Management, he 
took a poetry class that changed his life. 
Encouraged by his Pulitzer Prize-winning poet 
Maxine Kumin who became his mentor, and also 
Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, Mack 
switched majors and graduated from MIT's Writing Program.

Since then he has been in demand for his solo 
play Hearing Voices, Speaking in Tongues, which 
he began at MIT, and has since performed at the 
US Library of Congress, Off-Off-Broadway at the 
Times Square Arts Center, at Harvard and Yale 
Universities, and for scores of mental health 
conferences – even at the FBI's 32nd Annual Hostage Negotiation Seminar.

Tickets for the Paulist Center show are available 
at the door for a goodwill offering -- $15 suggested.

LOCATION. The Paulist Center is located at 5 Park 
Street, Boston MA 02108 -- half a block from the 
MBTA Park Street Station (Red Line & Green Line).

CAREFUL! If you're using a map search engine, 
watch out for another Park Street miles away on 
the other side of Boston. Be sure to use the Paulist Center zip code 02108.

More news & information at...
www.michaelmacklive.com

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