Damien, Aldyth
Morris’ one-man play now being performed by actor Casey Groves
off-Broadway in New York, tells the story of the Belgium-born
priest who ministered to the leper of the Hawaiian island,
Molokai, before dying of leprosy in 1889 at
the age of 49.
It is the powerful story
of a man who went where no priest would go -- to a rock of an island surrounded
by forbidding cliffs and pounding surf, a “place
without sunset,” where lepers were shipped by the board
of health to die. It is graphic --
Father Damien describes the lepers’ “maggot-bloated sores”
-- and it is transcendent. He copes “by remembering those
worm-infested ulcers are the wounds of Christ.”
What makes Damien such good
drama is that it portrays a man worthy of sainthood without
shrouding him in shallow piety.
He can be stubborn, angry and impatient, but these all-too-human
traits are overshadowed by his faith and compassion.
His work was to become the foundation
for a hospice
movement worldwide and, because of his ministry to people
dying of lethal infectious disease, he has become the
unofficial patron saint of people living with
AIDS.
A member of the Congregation
of the Sacred Heart, he was beatified June 4, 1995.
The play begins in 1936 when
Father Damien’s body is exhumed from its grave on Molokai to be sent back
to Belgium for burial in a place of honor. Father Damien
addresses the audience, voicing his protest that he is
being taken
away from the people for whom he had cared and died.
The story
then follows his life backwards
As his casket is at first taken
to the cathedral in Honolulu, Father Damien tells of his arrival there
in
1873. When his casket is loaded onto a ship and passes
Molokai, |
Groves
dramatizes the bulk of the story, beginning with Father
Damien’s first impressions. “Dear
God, how could such things be?” he asks when he sees
the lepers
and their living conditions. He
soon decides to stay. “This is my niche. This is what
I was meant to
do. This is why I was born.”
Wanting the lepers to live out
their lives in peace and beauty,
Father Damien builds houses, gardens, roads and docks
with
them, ministering and singing to them, as well as enforcing
discipline. He fights local
authorities and his own church to improve their lives.
He makes the
world aware of their agony.
We understand some of Father
Damien’s struggle as we hear his
side of an argument with the bishop who has apparently
been
asking him about the procedures he followed before giving
last rites
to two lepers. “You don’t ask a leper if he’s a Catholic,
your
excellency,” Father Damien snaps, giving his opinion
that God won’t either. “When a leper on his deathbed cries out for absolution,
you go to him … and in the name of Christ forgive him.”
But the bishop is not won over,
as Father Damien recounts.
“I was, his excellency says, a defective priest.”
In a powerful scene, we
see what Father Damien has to go
through to receive the sacraments after he has been diagnosed
with
leprosy. He has been in despair because he is barred
from going into Hawaii for the sacrament of reconciliation.
He speaks of what a great
hardship it is for a priest working without a companion priest to go weeks
or months
without being able to make a confession and sees this
tactic as his superiors’ way of forcing him off the island. “They want
to get rid of me,” he says. “They know I can’t live without the sacraments.” |
Finally a ship carrying his provincial anchors offshore
and Father Damien rows out beside it. Groves kneels on the floor, swaying
as if he were rolling on the sea in a small boat, and makes his confession.
“As the ship begins to move away,” he says, “I
feel the peace of absolution.”
The play closes with Father
Damien returning to Belgium, recognizing the farm of his
childhood and the Sacred Heart house where his father
took him when he was 20 to become a priest.
He is happy at first,
but has doubts about whether he shouldn’t have remained at
Molokai. Realizing that these doubts separate him from
Christ, he accepts his homecoming in peace. “If it is these doubts themselves
that come between us,
Lord, then I cast them out.”
Groves, 31, took on the role
of Father Damien as a student at De La Salle High School in New Orleans
in 1987. He has studied drama in England, been featured extensively at
the Shakespeare
Theatre in Washington, D.C., and has appeared in many
New York
productions.
“A lot of times I’m a mess personally,
but to play a character
who brought so much life and light in the midst of so
much suffering helps me cultivate that
kind of compassion,” he says. “It makes my heart light.
I don’t want to get too weird, but I feel he’s
with me, guarding me. I do feel blessed when I
do it.”
Damien, with Casey Groves, is
a beautiful play, beautifully
performed, about a life
beautifully lived.
Retta Blaney’s second book,
Working on the Inside: The
Spiritual Life Through the Eyes of Actors, will
be published next
year by Sheed & Ward. Groves is among the actors
featured |
