October 6, 2005

Irish-Catholic upbringing inspires
playwright to form theater company

By Mary Gottschalk

Rose Garden Resident

For Cathal Gallagher it started with a play and resulted in the founding of a theatre company.“I’d written a couple of plays for the Mostly Irish Theatre Company, then I wrote about the European Cardinal Midszenty and I thought, ‘I’ve got to find a Catholic theater company to send this to,’” says Gallagher, a Saratogan who was born in County Donegal, Ireland, and moved to the United States in 1957.

The solution was simple: – he founded one with the help of some other Catholic artists. ”We’re the only one in California,” he says.

The Latin name Quo Vadis was thrown out at the group’s first meeting and Gallagher says it seemed right.

”It goes back to Rome and translated, it’s ‘Where are you going?’ A Latin name sounded good for a Catholic theater company,” he says.

Now a decade old, Quo Vadis Theatre Company is dedicated to “high-quality drama without profanity, vulgarity and excessive violence,” Gallagher says.

On Oct. 6, Quo Vadis is staging the world premiere of Gallagher’s Claude Newman at Historic Hoover Theatre.

Gallagher hopes this will be the first of many productions at Hoover.

”I write two or three plays a year, but because our theater company doesn’t have a home, we do about one play a year. We do a couple of stage readings in churches, but we’d do four to six plays a year if we can get into Hoover,” Gallagher says.

A playwright for many years, Gallagher has been able to devote more time to it since retiring in 1998 from his job in the maintenance division of United Airlines.

”Since I’m Irish-Catholic, I write plays about saints, sinners, martyrs and heroic people. The audiences like it and they can bring their kids,” Gallagher says.

“They are biographical plays for the most part that are inspirational.”

The concept for writing Claude Newman came from a short story Gallagher read about the real Newman.

”It was intriguing because it’s about a guy on death row who claims to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary,” Gallagher says.

Initially, Gallagher says he was very skeptical of Newman’s newfound faith, but says, “this prisoner was quite willing to face death and withdrew all his appeals.”

Gallagher asked friends in Mississippi if they could do additional research on the case as it happened there in the 1940s.

It turned out that Catholic priest and prison chaplain Robert O’Leary, who was called at Newman’s request, was was also initially skeptical. He agreed to teach the prisoner catechism, but was surprised that he had never learned to read or write. The priest was further surprised to learn that Newman had never had any religious instruction and had no knowledge of who Jesus or Mary was.

During his weeks of instruction, Newman told the priest that the Blessed Virgin had told him about a vow O’Leary had made to her but had yet to keep.

Once Newman told the priest what the vow was, any doubts O’Leary had about Newman’s vision vanished, and in 1944 he baptized Newman.

Close to two decades later, O’Leary was interviewed about his experiences with Newman for a radio program.

Copies of that broadcast remain and one was sent to Gallagher.

”Most prisoners who get religion in prison do it for a reason,” Gallagher says. “They’re hoping to get a commutation or a reprieve or whatever,” Gallagher says.

”In this case, the prisoner didn’t hope for any such thing. He was willing to go into the next world.”

Gallagher prefers not to say whether Newman is executed in the play.