November 5, 2007   •   VOL. 45, NO. 19   •   Oakland, CA

Actor reprises one-man performance of ‘Damien’
 

Dan Cawthon

By Sharon Abercrombie
Staff writer

Dan Cawthon, a longtime theater arts teacher at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, is celebrating his pre-retirement year by growing a beard, donning grease paint, and exchanging his civvies for a priest’s cassock.

Beginning this month, the Equity actor is reprising his role as “Damien,” the one-man performance piece about the leper priest of Molokai that he debuted in 1980 at the Berkeley Stage Company. Cawthon toured extensively with the show on and off during the 80’s, culminating in a two-week run at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989.

The new opening night for “Damien” is scheduled for Nov. 30 at 7:30 p.m. at St. Perpetua Church in Lafayette. Cawthon also has a performance scheduled for Dec. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at his own parish — Holy Spirit/Newman Hall in Berkeley, as well as two engagements at Saint Mary’s College next March. He hopes to take the play on tour through the winter and spring to even more Bay Area parishes and is presently looking for venues.

His teaching colleagues at Saint Mary’s encouraged Cawthon to remount the production of Damien as a closing salvo before he says farewell to the Moraga school in May.

Scheduled performances Friday, Nov. 30, 7:30 p.m. St. Perpetua Church 3454 Hamlin Road, Lafayette $10 adults; $5 students Friday, Dec. 7, 7:30 p.m. Holy Spirit/Newman Hall 2700 Dwight Way, Berkeley $10 adults; $5 students Friday, Jan. 18, 7:30 p.m. Episcopal Church of the Resurrection 399 Gregory Lane, Pleasant Hill Thursday & Friday, March 27 & 28, 8 p.m. Soda Center Saint Mary’s College, Moraga

The gray-haired professor first joined the college’s religious studies faculty in 1980 and was instrumental in establishing Saint Mary’s performing arts department which he chaired for 15 years. He is also a founding member of the graduate liberal studies faculty at the college and continues to serve on its advisory board.

He has performed at the Berkeley and San Jose Repertory Theatres, the California Shakespeare Festival and directed productions at the Willows Theatre in Concord and the Center Repertory Theatre in Walnut Creek.

Cawthon holds a Ph.D. in theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and taught in the religious studies department at the University of Manitoba in Canada before moving to California.

As he revisits the life of the dedicated priest, who was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995, Cawthon said this time around with “Damien” is as compelling an adventure as it was 27 years ago.

“It is sobering to walk in that man’s shoes,” observed Cawthon. “He’s an incredible model of selfless action on the part of others.”

Although plagued with doubts as to whether his ministry to the lepers of Molokai was the result of his own pride or the work of Christ, Damien’s faith sustained him through the 16 years he lived among them, the actor explained.

“The play is especially timely during these days when the priesthood, the Catholic faith, even religion itself, are the objects of derision,” he said.

Written by Aldyth Morris, “Damien” opens in 1936 when the body of Father Damien is being moved by ship from Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands to Louvain, Belgium, near his birthplace of Tremeloo.

During the long voyage Cawthon takes the audience on a journey back in time through flashbacks of the life of Father Joseph Damien de Veuster, who arrived on Molokai on May 11, 1873 at the age of 33.

“They (the lepers) must have a priest so that they know God has not forgotten them,” Damien says at one point in the play. His chief purpose for staying in Hawaii was “to bring the leper’s plight before the world,” the priest explains.

After 11 years of tackling both the physical and spiritual needs of his people, including binding the lepers’ wounds, he contracted the disease and died in 1889.
Father Damien is one of Dan Cawthon’s favorite priest heroes. However, in his long career in theater, Cawthon has also admired the playwright Eugene O’Neill and serves as the artistic director of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, Tao House, in Danville.

Although O’Neill, an Irish Catholic, left the Church as a young man, “he filled his plays with religion, willy nilly,” said Cawthon. Cawthon should know — he wrote his doctoral dissertation on O’Neill’s theological underpinnings, focusing upon “A Moon for the Misbegotten.”

Cawthon first discovered O’Neill while in high school in Oklahoma when his class read “Bound East for Cardiff.” “Then, a decade later, I was privileged to see Ingrid Bergman and Coleen Dewhurst in ‘More Stately Mansions’ in New York, and it made a strong impression on me.”

In a recent article he penned for The Journal of Religion and Theater, Cawthon writes that O’Neill’s plays “are experiments in mythmaking, or discovering a new set of religious symbols to replace the ones which had been destroyed. He descends into the darkness of his soul in hopes of discovering both the experience of and images for transcendence.”

During an interview, Cawthon said he believes a quote from “Long Day’s Journey into Night” best represents O’Neill’s dramatic and spiritual vision:

“Like a saint’s vision of beatitude, like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand, for a second you see — and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning. Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!”

O’Neill’s words describing the Dark Night of the Soul, the agony and ecstasy of encounters and lack of encounters with both the Divine and with creativity, reflect Father Damien’s struggles as he tried to sort out his own motives in caring for the lepers.

For more information about scheduling “Damien,” contact Dan Cawthon at (925) 946-0108, or e-mail him at dcawthon@stmarys-ca.edu. Additional information is also available at: www.leperpriest.com.

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