Enacting the Past: Local Historical Drama

The historical pageant play has a tradition in Hawai’i.³³⁹ In the last few decades, however, different kinds of Local plays that engage history in creative ways have appeared. The sparse and economical monodramas of Aldyth Morris, for example, center on figures such as Captain Cook, Robert Louis Stevenson, Queen Lili’uokalani, and the Belgian priest Father Damien. One actor has to express the possible inner life of strong characters that have shaped Hawai’i. Several plays have been produced in mainland theaters as well as abroad; Damien was produced for public television and has been translated into Flemish, French, Japanese, and Spanish. Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl has also written several plays on Hawaiian history, some of them for children. Both The Conversion of

338 Quoted in Stanton 1997: 149.

339 For a concise survey of the history of drama in Hawai’i, see Dennis Carroll (ed.), Kumu Kahua Plays, Honolulu 1983: ix-xix, “Introduction.”

Ka’ahumanu (on the advent of Christianity) and Ka’iulani (on a hapa-Hawaiian princess who befriended Robert Louis Stevenson and died at a young age) have been staged in the mainland United States and in Europe. In 1993, her street pageant January, 1893 about the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy was performed at the sites where the actual events had taken place. More recently, Sean T.C. O’Malley has dramatized the same time period with his play on the Wilcox revolution, To the Last Hawaiian Soldier (produced in 2002 for Kumu Kahua Theatre).

Darrell Lum’s Pidgin play Oranges are Lucky comments on the futility of memory and history if they cannot be communicated. A Chinese family celebrates the birthday of Ah Po, the aged grandmother. While the old woman slips into Chinese (rendered in formal Standard English) in her reminiscing, her older grandson gets drunk and complains: “Nobody can understand you and you no can understand us. So what’s the use, you’re just as good as dead.”³⁴⁰ Ah Po’s daughter, who as part of the middle generation could provide a link between her mother and her sons – and could translate what Ah Po is saying – stifles the younger grandson’s questions about the past: “Waste time dat kine. If we was royalty or something, maybe worth it. But you Ah Po only from one court official’s family, small potatoes dat.”³⁴¹

The most interesting and self-conscious playwright dealing with history, memory, and loss is the late John Kneubuhl, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s uncle. Born in Samoa to a Swiss-American father and a Samoan mother in 1919, John Kneubuhl came to Hawai’i at age twelve, attending Punahou School, then went on to Yale University to study creative writing under Thornton Wilder. He came back as a playwright and became the assistant director of the Honolulu Community Theatre. Envisioning a genuinely Local (read:

Pacific) theater to include “the various groups that make up island society,” he produced two of his own plays in 1947. The Harp in the Willows, a historical play about the Big Island missionary Lorenzo Lyons, contained “extensive passages of untranslated Hawaiian dialogue and verses of Hawaiian hymns composed by Lyons himself.”³⁴² The City Is Haunted portrayed postwar Honolulu in an expressionist style. It may also have been “the first pidgin-English play ever produced” in the islands.³⁴³ From 1949 to 1968, Kneubuhl was a successful television screenwriter in Hollywood. Moving back to

340 Carroll 1983: 80.

341 Ibid.: 72.

342 Ibid.: xiv.

American Samoa to maintain his integrity and sanity, he wrote several plays that center on cultural or ethnic identity and its fragility or loss. His work and philosophy are as much informed by education and experience as by traditional Polynesian performance such as the Samoan fale aitu, literally “house of spirits.” He describes this clowning practice as “not an aesthetic experience, but a psychosocial experience. It tends more towards politics than art.”³⁴⁴ Moreover, he reasons that “In a world that’s become increasingly tense, formalized, and over-intellectualized, comedy seems to me a very healthy, wonderful release.”³⁴⁵ The fusion of postmodern play and ancient release ritual opens up a space for lucid insights into the nature of contemporary Pacific situatedness, envisioned as caught up between a fast-moving present and an almost forgotten past.

Reviewing Kneubuhl’s life and work, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, a fellow Samoan scholar, notes “an apparent conflation of identities – Hawaiian and Samoan – into the broader category of ‘Polynesian.’”³⁴⁶ Thus, while his work could as well be discussed under the ethnicity heading, the pervasive slippage of ethnic identification in Kneubuhl’s statements points to a different focus of his undeniably ‘ethnic’ plays. Such a focus seems to be a creative coming to terms with the past.

Three of Kneubuhl’s later pieces belong together in that they “are really about the making of plays, […] about the writer and his search.”³⁴⁷ Written in 1975 but not staged until 1998, Mele Kanikau: A Pageant experiments with “the idea of the writer-creating-the-story-which-in-turn-creates-the-writer”³⁴⁸ as well as with self-referentiality, inserting a hula performance into a rehearsal of the pageant, which is another performance that forms the bulk of the play, a third performance. This Chinese box structure is used with great skill, effecting slippage, uncertainty, and even absurdity. The title refers to the Local tradition of showy historical pageants, and the Hawaiian part translates as song or chant of lamentation. What is lamented here is the loss of native Hawaiian identity and

343 Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, “John Kneubuhl’s ‘Polynesian’ Theater at the Crossroads: At Play in the Fields of Cultural Identity,” in Amerasia 26 No. 2 (2000): 209-33, here 214-5. Jackie Pualani Johnson elaborates: “He wrote the play after bristling at an editorial that demanded a ban on pidgin in schools, since he felt pidgin to be ‘a very poetic thing’” (Afterword to John Kneubuhl, Think of a Garden and Other Plays, Honolulu 1997: 254).

344 Vilsoni Hereniko, “An Interview with John A. Kneubuhl,” in Manoa 5 No.1 (Summer 1993): 99-105, here 105. Kneubuhl died in February 1992.

345 Hereniko 1993: 103.

346 Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2000: 209.

347 Kneubuhl 1997: 257.

348 Ibid.: 260. The play’s “elaborate production demands coupled with the casting of complex bilingual characters resulted in the decades-long delay in staging” (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2000: 219).

authenticity, replaced by cheap imitations. Kneubuhl lets his (alter ego) author figure have the last word: “And remember. For it is only in our remembering that we can make our mele, like houses of words into which our dead can move and live again and speak to us” (175).

In a similar fashion but with even more intricacies and formal daring, the 1990 A Play: A Play poses the question “are we living lives scripted by The Creator? (By the colonialists?)” (265). Actors are rehearsing a play on Lili’uokalani, when a visitor – an actor playing a mahu (Hawaiian for gay) playing a woman playing the volcano goddess Pele playing an old crone – unsettles their routine. Parody, travesty, and impersonation extend to language, which is foregrounded on various levels: Some lines are given in English with stage directions to render them in Chinese, Samoan, or Hawaiian. A character in the play-to-be may speak a foreign language but his actor in the frame play does not. Filipino pronunciation makes for a running gag (“Who pucked with the fig,”

201). As the characters are becoming aware that their words are “scripted,” and inconsistently so, one of them complains: “Knowledge has to come logically in the world of the play…. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, like it’s straight from god. Gods have got to play by the rules, too” (235). After the actors have realized that they are merely fictional characters, this idea is transferred to Hawaiian identity: “You can only define a Hawaiian today by what he has lost – by what he no longer is or can ever be again. […]

They have all assumed roles, as if in a play they are all acting out, author unknown….

They are all fictions, inventions, words – even the angry protestors, perhaps worst of all, the angry protestors” (246). In the afterword to a collection of the three plays, Jackie Pualani Johnson sums up A Play’s theme: “The Writer comes to realize the glory, sanctity, and limitation of the very thing his life (all life) is based on: Language; Words”

(257).

Kneubuhl’s last play Think of a Garden, written in 1991, “flirts with autobiography”³⁴⁹ and is set in Western Samoa in the 1920s. Two strands are interwoven to mirror one another: the historical narrative of the assassination of Tupua Tamasese, leader of the pacifist Mau rebellion that led to independence of Western Samoa from New Zealand, is linked to the coming of age of a part-Samoan boy, David. In his character,

“imagination itself” appears “as a space of resistance against the vagaries of tormented

349 Kneubuhl 1997: 2.

adulthood and history. […] In both narratives, the consequence of that resistance is self-determination. David is emotionally freed to move towards manhood, and Samoa is politically freed to move towards independence.”³⁵⁰ In the assessment of Caroline Sinavaiana,

Kneubuhl’s hybrid voice – native son of Polynesia meets the Eastern seaboard avant-garde, native sensibilities cross-pollinating with Western aesthetics of performance – is among the earliest Pacific literary voices in English to articulate the sheer distance of culture and history being traced in his life path.³⁵¹

An important avenue for Local drama – historical, ethnic, Pidgin, or whatever other form the genre has taken – has been Kumu Kahua, the first “Honolulu theatre group established solely for the encouragement of Hawaii’s playwrights,”³⁵² founded in 1971 by University of Hawai’i drama professor Dennis Carroll and some of his graduate students. Looking back on the first decade of activity, Carroll asserted: “Preference has been given to plays that depict the milieu of Hawaii and to those that are unconventional in form or style.”

This still applies to the current practice, but with their own venue, the homey Kumu Kahua Theatre in downtown Honolulu, the group has expanded its repertoire to incorporate Hawaiian-language plays, or recitals and readings such as For the Love of Words and 4 da luv of Pidgin in 2002. An independent community theater since 1981, Kumu Kahua has produced works by Edward Sakamoto, Darrell Lum, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, John Kneubuhl, Lee Cataluna, and Alani Apio, as well as adaptions of Yamanaka’s, Keller’s, and Pak’s novels.

350 Sinavaiana-Gabbard 2000: 229.

351 Ibid.: 218.

352 Carroll 1983: ix. Kumu Kahua is Hawaiian for ‘original stage,’ as kumu is the source, the origin, while kahua means foundation or encampment.

There is a fascination in the descendents (sic!) of immigrants for the first generation, for the men and women who came with only their names and their stories to these islands. Their homelands are little more than a dream to us now, as Hawaii was once a rumor, a dream to them. Martha Webb – “Introduction,” to Talk Story: Big Island Anthology³⁵³