Leonardo Defilippis’s latest one-man stage production, VIANNEY, opens amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, a time which mirrors the secularization, materialism and anti-religious sentiment of our own day. Against this dramatic backdrop, a simple ignorant peasant priest enters the backwater town of Ars, a place where no one cares much about their faith, or sees the Church as particularly relevant. They don’t expect much out of John Vianney.

Born into a farm family at Dardilly, France on May 8, 1786, three years before the storming of the Bastille that began the French Revolution, John Vianney’s early years were spent against the backdrop of a country whose Catholic heritage and Faith had been systematically destroyed.