Still Point's full time mission is to portray modern spiritual heroes. The Hermit in New York, wrought from the journals of Thomas Merton, is the story of a contemporary man of faith practicing the fourth century tradition of eremitism, while remaining a participant in the crowded, lawless modern world.

Beau O'Reilly
as Thomas Merton

Merton wrote and published an enormous body of work in the isolation and silence of the Trappist community at Gethsemane, and later in his hermitage in the woods. His pacifism, which helped to make him a world famous solitary, was directly opposed by his superiors. Thomas Merton's struggle was to honor his vow of obedience to the hierarchy of the Church without violating his covenant with God. He imagined the story of Jonah and the whale as a picture of the modern Christian: Jonah as Christ in the belly of the leviathan institution of the Church, and warned against worshiping the whale by mistake. Merton never lost sight of the fact that only deep in the belly of the whale, in the silence within silence that was his forest home, could he write and pray with enough rigor to engage the world.

Mathew Smith and Beau O'Reilly
as James Fox and Thomas Merton

In the mid-sixties he was allowed to leave the monastery for a weekend in order to have tea with Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki in New York City. Here begins The Hermit in New York. Merton wrangles with Abbot James Fox for creative control of his art and spiritual practice, talks politics with Kentucky poor white Andy Boone, romances a beautiful nurse named Melanie, and spends a summer afternoon in the woods with Mrs. Hanayama, a survivor of the atomic bomb. The play is performed by two actors and staged in a neat minimalist style. The Hermit in New York opens a window on the world of Thomas Merton: a solitary, a celebrity, and an ordinary man.