Resurrection Stages Performance of 'Damien'

“Damien," the sainted leper priest of Hawaii’s Moloka’i, came to Rye’s Church of the Resurrection Sunday.

“Damien” came in the form of a one-man play written by Aldyth Morris, performed by veteran stage and TV actor Casey Groves and brought here by Resurrection parochial vicar Father Robert Verrigni.

Groves brought Damien to life during his solo, virtually prop-less 80-minute performance on the Resurrection main altar, limping around the altar beneath the flickering candles and stained glass windows with a crab-like shuffle as he told the dramatic story of the heroic priest whose left leg was being eaten away by leprosy.

The play tells the gripping story of the Belgium-born priest, an uneducated farm boy initially deemed not intelligent enough for the priesthood who ministered to people with leprosy on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i for nearly 20 years before dying of the disease in 1889 at the age of 49.

Father Damien, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, was beatified in 1995 and was canonized in 2009 after being credited with two “miraculous” cures for cancer and intestinal illness.

His saint's day is celebrated on April 15.

Rye’s “Father Bob” Verrigni had first seen “Damien” around a year ago and thought it would make a compelling performance at Resurrection during Lent. He spent around eight months arranging for Groves to give his acclaimed performance at the church.

It was worth the wait.

The play opens with Hawaiian chants followed by what seems like a disembodied voice coming out of nowhere talking about Jozef Damien De Veuster, a grain merchant’s son who would become the sainted leper priest almost by default.

That voice belongs to Groves shuffling slowly from the back of the church, past the assembled congregation and up onto the altar almost devoid of props except for a boulder, a Spartan desk and chair, and a plank leading to the lectern.

Wearing a black cassock, Groves turns that backdrop into Moloka’i, the “charnel” house of an island that was a “dumping ground,” a living graveyard, a kind of Siberia for suffering Hawaiian souls with leprosy without a hospital, a church, or even a cemetery or a priest of their own until Damien came over the objections of his bishop in the late 1800s.

As the play unfolds, Damien becomes one of those lepers himself, administering to the lepers' spiritual needs regardless of their religion, age or sex. 

Along the way, he becomes a missionary by replacing a priest who became sick, takes on the Hawaiian Board of Health (who allegedly allotted $6 per year for each of the island’s 3,000 lepers for food, clothing and shelter), rebuilds a village wiped out by a hurricane, fights various sexual temptations, antagonizes his bishops, tames a “Village of Fools” (where lepers with nothing to live for indulge in wine, women, song and more) and brings worldwide attention to leprosy, leading to advances towards the cure.

When he dies, his body is buried in Moloka’i and exhumed 12 years later—showing no signs of decomposition—so he can be reburied near his home in Belgium at the command of his king.

At the play’s end, Groves was greeted with a standing ovation from a rapt audience at the church that included area priests and nuns from the Franciscan motherhouse in Hastings-on-Hudson.

In a Q&A session after the performance, Groves said he first performed the “Damien” role when he was 16 back in his native New Orleans in 1987 and has since performed it more than 150 times, including two successful off-Broadway runs.

Groves has appeared in several productions at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C and has recently appeared on “Law and Order,” “Damages,” “One Life to Live” and “As the World Turns.”

He is an adjunct theatre professor at New Jersey's St. Peter’s College, has various college and post graduate degrees in acting and religion, and is available to bring “Damien” to your place of worship. Call Father Robert Verrigni to find out how.

For more information, call 914-967-0142.