The Multiple Faces of 'The Leper King'

By Siobhan Peiffer

It's late afternoon near the end of shopping period, and in the office of Trumbull Dean William di Canzio, DRA '85, the usual stacks of yellow schedules are accompanied by piles of scripts, costume sketches, and pictures of a 1950s Navy doctor named Tom Dooley. Di Canzio's play The Leper King, a dramatization of Dooley's life, will premiere in a stage reading on Sat., Jan. 24, at St. Thomas More Chapel, and di Canzio is busy with last-minute production details. Interspersed between administrative phone calls, he fields messages about a shakuhachi (a Japanese flute), which is featured in the script but might seem rare in New Haven.

Not so, as it turns out. Jonathan Edwards Master Gary Haller happened to be hosting a shakuhachi Master's Tea. "Elements just come together," di Canzio said of his good fortune at finding the flute. The final show will include many such elements, with diverse settings ranging from the jungles of Laos to the cathedrals of New York City, featuring gold masks and jeweled diadems, original music and choreography, and chant and liturgical plainsong, in an unusually detailed "reading."

And while some of the elements--like the shakuhachi--fell into place at the last minute, di Canzio's project has a longer history. He began it in earnest four years ago, drawing upon the roots of his Catholic childhood. Di Canzio's protagonist, Tom Dooley, is as complex a figure as one could possibly imagine, a character full of contradictions. A Catholic prep school boy who enlisted in the Navy, Dooley served in North and South Vietnam as a refugee doctor after the 1954 Geneva Accord.

Decorated by the Vietnamese government and celebrated by a press grateful for his bestsellers about Navy experience, he was welcomed back to the United States by an adoring fan club. Top brass told him he had a good shot at making Surgeon General. Yet, curiously, he quit the Navy abruptly and returned to his medical practice in Southeast Asia. Dooley earned Laotian citizenship, founded his own relief organization, and provided health services to hundreds of thousands of refugees in ill-equipped clinics until his death from cancer at age 34.

Di Canzio can remember first-hand the fuss about America's soldier-saint. "Dooley's books were on my parents' bookshelves," he said, probably because the Catholic Book of the Month Club circulated them widely. "My [childhood] impression was [of] this heroic jungle doctor." Dooley's undeniable heroism promoted a kind of popular sainthood--as did his good looks, which had Hollywood producers wondering, when Kirk Douglas bought the rights to Dooley's books, whether Douglas or Dooley himself would play the lead.

Yet such movie projects fizzled as suddenly as his case for canonization within the Catholic church ended. The Navy forced Dooley's sudden resignation after finding out what Hollywood and the Catholics would later discover for themselves: that Dooley was a homosexual.

The decision followed an exhaustive, detailed "investigation" of Dooley's past behavior. "There are 700 pages documenting his interrogation...there they are, in the Library of Congress," di Canzio attested.

Dooley's story had earlier caught the interest of another Yale professor, James Fisher, a former DUS of American Studies and onetime chaplain at St. Thomas More. Fisher's 1987 collection of essays, The Catholic Counter Culture, disclosed the Navy interrogation and Dooley's open homosexuality; Fisher's full biography of Dooley, Dr. America, was recently published.

The essays "opened my eyes," di Canzio said, and he read many chapters of Fisher's biography in manuscript form. Di Canzio's own research took him to St. Louis, where Dooley was born, and Washington, as he collected material for what he eventually knew would be a dramatic treatment of this extraordinary subject.

Historical topics are nothing new to di Canzio; his most recent play was an adaption of Victor Hugo, and his favorite drama-school project focused on the life of a 10th-century nun.

"It's kind of a theme," he said. Still, The Leper King "is in no sense an attempt to be an historical docudrama," he explained. "It's about love and death and life and art and East and West and theater and war."

Far greater than Di Canzio's interest in his history is his attraction to big subjects and all-encompassing themes. For a show with a cast of eight, The Leper King is a remarkable example of such large-scale vision. Characters range from John F. Kennedy, who fights with his father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., about buying congressional seats, to Thanatos, a half-human, half-mythical figure who appears as an Asian refugee, a diseased god, and a phoenix. From the opening stage directions, which name the settings as "the United States, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and infinity," the play blends different times and locales to present Dooley's life within a framework of East Asian myth and Catholic redemptive ceremony. The Leper King is a self-proclaimed "history play" recounted from a perspective that Thanatos calls "serene infinity."

It was exactly this breadth of vision that di Canzio sought in a director. After seeing a production by Shawn-Marie Garrett, DRA '98, that made the Cabaret seem, in Di Canzio's words, "monumental," he approached Garrett with The Leper King and she agreed to take on the project. Di Canzio enlisted another Yalie, Laurence Rosania, MC '79, to compose the music.

Over dinner, Garrett and di Canzio persuaded Michael Tracy of Pilobolus Dance Theatre to choreograph the show. Other collaborations were more spontaneous, or at times simply fortuitous.

Irisa Tekerian, who designed a series of masks for Thanatos, gods and goddesses, and the chorus of Vietnamese refugees, is the mother of one of the actors and just happened to see an early reading of the play. The final cast includes undergraduate and graduate students, Yale faculty members, and several professional actors.

The script will most likely be produced elsewhere during the summer, according to di Canzio. A likely venue is the O'Neill festival, which has shown some of his other plays. Di Canzio, who also teaches a playwriting seminar for the English department, is leaving his administrative post at Trumbull to "have more time for writing." This Saturday's reading will be a farewell example of di Canzio's propensity to unify, as he brings together the roles of Dean and dramatist one last time.

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