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Given the events at the Vatican today, mention of the great dramatic work by Demetrius Toteras does not seem inappropriate.
The text of Sunday They'll Make Me a Saint can still be obtained. A new edition is needed.
(Above) Peter Kriss as Toteras in "Sunday They'll Make Me a Saint"
"Soon there will be a champion amongst us
an eternal champion mounted on a red sorrel,
aprons of steel...Saint Picalo"
Reverend: "Canonise him now, Luther...They shall forget the man and only speak of the Saint. You shall be remembered when the last man looks at the burning sun and falls to his knees whispering Saint Picalo. They will have forgotten us but not you, Patron Saint of the men of the night, father to thieves and murderers...We have made another man more than just a man who was born to die. We have made you a man who must die!"
From Demetrius Toteras, Sunday They'll Make Me a Saint
From the foreword to Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint:
“In the course of thirty-five years of involvement with international writers from many cultures and countries, no work has made a more lasting impact on me than Toteras’ Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint. I first read The Saint in 1968, and it has never become dated. It had a profoundly liberating effect then, as it does today. The Saint is a study of confinement which takes us into strange worlds without signposts, worlds beyond reason and logic. The language is one of constant inventiveness and the writing is full of original imagery. I believe Toteras is one of the most important voices of the English-speaking Greek Diaspora. This includes those Greeks who “dispersed” overseas to participate in the cultural and economic development of colonies, to trade, or who were refugees from poverty and political upheaval. In Toteras’ case, he found himself in tough circumstances, a Greek-American who grew up amongst the poverty of African-Americans, who fought in the Korean War and was a prisoner-of-war in his teens. His language reflects this background. It has the direct vitality and oral immediacy of the street, but his mother-tongue and further study of pre-classical and classical Greek gives his work extraordinary dimensions and philosophical resonances. Toteras also inherited the Greeks’ natural propensity for theatre and drama, including the heroic vision of self and the acceptance of death as a heroic act rather than as an inevitable event. In a lonely cell Toteras creates a “theatre of the mind". As you read The Saint you may say, “What is going on here?” Read it as a dramatic poem. Read it as a study of confinement. Read it as theatre of the mind. Read it to yourself out loud… Once you have read it, the experience will mark you. Perhaps we all need to experience confinement, even without bars, in order to become truly creative, free and human. I invite you to lock yourself in Toteras’ prison cell and participate in the canonization of the Patron Saint of Criminals and Men of the Night". JP.
From the foreword to Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint:
“In the course of thirty-five years of involvement with international writers from many cultures and countries, no work has made a more lasting impact on me than Toteras’ Sunday They’ll Make Me a Saint. I first read The Saint in 1968, and it has never become dated. It had a profoundly liberating effect then, as it does today. The Saint is a study of confinement which takes us into strange worlds without signposts, worlds beyond reason and logic. The language is one of constant inventiveness and the writing is full of original imagery. I believe Toteras is one of the most important voices of the English-speaking Greek Diaspora. This includes those Greeks who “dispersed” overseas to participate in the cultural and economic development of colonies, to trade, or who were refugees from poverty and political upheaval. In Toteras’ case, he found himself in tough circumstances, a Greek-American who grew up amongst the poverty of African-Americans, who fought in the Korean War and was a prisoner-of-war in his teens. His language reflects this background. It has the direct vitality and oral immediacy of the street, but his mother-tongue and further study of pre-classical and classical Greek gives his work extraordinary dimensions and philosophical resonances. Toteras also inherited the Greeks’ natural propensity for theatre and drama, including the heroic vision of self and the acceptance of death as a heroic act rather than as an inevitable event. In a lonely cell Toteras creates a “theatre of the mind". As you read The Saint you may say, “What is going on here?” Read it as a dramatic poem. Read it as a study of confinement. Read it as theatre of the mind. Read it to yourself out loud… Once you have read it, the experience will mark you. Perhaps we all need to experience confinement, even without bars, in order to become truly creative, free and human. I invite you to lock yourself in Toteras’ prison cell and participate in the canonization of the Patron Saint of Criminals and Men of the Night". JP.
From the typescript by DKT.
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