Kahana Ho and Stuart Featheran Jr. in “Kāmau Aʻe” at at Kumu Kahua Theatre. (Photograph from Kumu Kahua)
In 1972, the primary Pageant of Pacific Arts and Tradition, then known as the South Pacific Pageant of Arts, was held in Fiji. The delegation from Hawaii was not invited to take part. This 12 months, although, FestPAC—the world’s largest celebration of indigenous Pacific Islanders, showcasing the heritage and artistry of 28 delegations—is being held in Oahu, Hawaii, beginning June 6. Initially deliberate for 2020, the quadrennial pageant was postponed as a result of coronavirus pandemic. Although Hawaii skilled one of many lowest standardized cumulative dying charges from Covid-19 within the nation, its financial system was one of many hardest hit throughout lockdown attributable to its dependence on tourism.
All of the whereas, native Hawaiians have continued to be pushed or priced out of their ancestral lands, regardless of legislative guarantees to return almost 1,000 acres. This has a protracted historical past, going again to the Eighteen Nineties, when the state and federal authorities claimed nearly all of Hawaiian land in an unlawful overthrow and annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, adopted by the Kamehameha Faculties belief, county municipalities, and varied personal entities. (Two of the state’s islands at the moment are within the arms of majority personal homeowners: Niihau by the Robinson Household of Scottish settlers, and Lanai by software program exec Larry Ellison.)
Amid this ongoing darkness, hope glimmers, because it usually does, by a murals that displays and reshapes this historical past. Longtime collaborators playwright Alani Apio and creative director Harry Wong III noticed a possibility to understand a shared dream 30 years within the making: to concurrently stage all three performs in Apio’s The Kāmau Trilogy. The household of performs, targeted on therapeutic intergenerational trauma, had been every commissioned and individually staged by Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, starting with Kāmau in 1994, then Kāmau Aʻe in 1998, and at last Ua Pau in 2019.
The performs will probably be offered individually in addition to collectively for your entire month of June in an immersive back-to-back expertise. Kāmau will probably be offered on Thursdays, Kāmau Aʻe on Fridays, and Ua Pau on Saturdays at 7 p.m. All three will run in succession for particular Sunday marathons, with the primary play beginning at 1 p.m. and the occasion concluding round 8 p.m. On marathon days, meals from Glad Stomach Eatery and quite a lot of snacks will probably be obtainable for buy. The Kāmau Trilogy has additionally been revealed by Kamehameha Publishing. Copies of the e book will probably be on the market on the theatre all through the trilogy’s run.
Apio considers the performs semi-autobiographical and impressed by internalized trauma, having misplaced a number of relations to suicide and witnessed the erasure of their heritage. It wasn’t till he took a category with Haunani-Kay Trask, a frontrunner in training and the sovereignty motion on the College of Hawai’i at Mānoa, that he got here to know his personal grief as Hawaii’s too.
“I wrote Kāmau as an exorcism and an exploration of all of that,” Apio mentioned in a latest Zoom interview alongside his collaborator, Wong. “It was primarily based on my life till I used to be about 20. Kāmau Aʻe displays my life in my 20s, what I noticed occurring within the sovereignty motion in Hawaii, and the bigger society’s actions and reactions to it.”
The primary play follows Alika, a Kanaka tour information whose relationship along with his cousin Michael is examined when the household is evicted from their ancestral beachside homestead to make means for a luxurious resort. The play’s title bears the message “stick with it.” The second play picks up a decade later, as Michael, now affiliated with a sovereignty group, and Alika, now the resort supervisor, vie for management of the house they as soon as knew.
As an actor, playwright, and sculptor from an Oahu fishing household, Apio discovered the private side of the writing course of painful however in the end therapeutic. “In all of those performs, nearly each scene is constructed on a lived expertise,” he mentioned. “My problem was, after I wrote it, I lived out each scene, I acted out each scene on my own, alone in a room, crying and yelling and feeling all of the feelings in order that I might put it on a web page. That’s the place my deepest ache occurred.
“Then, when Harry directed it and so they introduced it to the stage, but once more, watching it really play out was extremely painful,” he continued. “Now, 5 years later, sitting and dealing by it each night time with Harry in rehearsals, each of us are seeing for the primary time all of the resonances and echoes that occur all through the performs, which might be embedded in them—however you don’t get to go to that depth until and till you set all of them collectively. That’s been actually rewarding for me.”
Why the 20-year hole between the second and third performs? Apio defined that he wanted extra life expertise to successfully give these characters closure. “I didn’t notice it on the time, however by the point I had completed writing Kāmau Aʻe, I had actually caught up with my very own life. I couldn’t discover an trustworthy throughline for the characters.”
He struggled to jot down the third play for years, till the mid-2010s, when a second of readability arose out of a depressive episode. “My life had performed itself out sufficient that I might see the place these characters had been going to go,” Apio mentioned, “as a result of I’m a mirrored image of those characters, or they’re a mirrored image of elements of me.” And so the cycle was full.
The trilogy concludes with Alika and Michael’s niece Stevie, the daughter of their different cousin, who tragically dedicated suicide years prior, as she makes an attempt to heal previous wounds and free the spirits that hang-out her household.
There’s a principle in psychology often called psychological time journey. It posits that individuals, significantly these with post-traumatic stress, are in a position to expertise themselves prior to now, current, and future, as a result of the cognitive processes of recollection, thought, and expectation are knowledgeable by episodic reminiscence. When individuals bear in mind, they relive. Unsurprisingly, then, the expertise of rehearsing these performs in succession has been emotional for the forged and inventive crew.
Wong, who directed every of the unique productions and helped tour them all through the islands, even staging Kāmau on the 2008 FestPAC in American Samoa, has joined Apio in revisiting the trilogy. He referenced the three tenets from Wallace Stevens’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction: “1. It should be summary, 2. It should change, 3. It should give pleasure.”
The trilogy, he mentioned, does all that and extra. When it comes to abstraction, he mentioned, “These performs are simply taken out of actuality. While you come again to it, you’ve modified, so what you’re studying has modified. Or perhaps I’ve simply learn it as soon as as we speak, and I’m going to learn it as soon as tonight earlier than I fall asleep, and it’s modified. For me, these performs have modified over time. They’ve developed, I’ve modified, and that’s one thing that additionally makes the performs nice. This trilogy always modifications.”
As for pleasure, Wong mentioned, “I carry on telling the actors to have enjoyable, and so they take a look at me like I’m insane as a result of they’re going by probably the most painful issues. However these actors, they’re courageous. I imply, they go for it.”
Each Wong and Apio studied with professor emeritus and founding Kumu Kahua member Dr. Dennis Carroll at college and credit score him with broadening their creative vocabulary whereas additionally increasing the definition of theatre that was accessible to locals in Hawaii. Their influences danced from the Oresteia to Meyerhold, from Viola Spolin to Joseph Chaikin and past. However on the coronary heart of the work there was at all times Carroll.
On the crux of the trilogy is the Hawaiian idea of kuleana, a phrase which loosely interprets to “accountability” or “obligation,” although each Apio and Wong agreed that its which means doesn’t adequately translate into English. The idea refers to a acknowledged symbiotic relationship between an individual and their group, household, occupation, and self. It’s each one’s present and one’s ethical obligation to these round them, and recollects that Hawaii was as soon as a communal land system. Dwelling and wealth had been by no means meant to be inherited however as a substitute shared, which makes it much more difficult for native Hawaiians to reclaim by ancestry; their language has no phrase for “personal.” On this means, Wong defined, the Hawaiian lifestyle has been essentially modified by the aggressive affect of capitalism and fee-simple land possession.
Sovereignty means various things to completely different individuals. On the threat of oversimplifying, some need independence for Hawaii; others need federal recognition just like the protections utilized to Native People and different Indigenous teams; nonetheless others wish to stay on the land their households have cultivated for generations. Nevertheless it’s by no means that straightforward. Native Hawaiians now make up solely 22 p.c of the state’s general inhabitants, primarily attributable to lack of inexpensive housing.
“That is the place my household lived for 5 generations,” mentioned Wong, gesturing out his window towards a mountain on the horizon, and to urbanized excessive rises ascending from the valley under. “I stay in the identical space that they had been born in.” Nevertheless it’s not the identical because it was. He sees the trilogy as a possibility, even a kuleana, to take again Hawaii’s story and share it with the delegations at FestPAC.
“For all of those characters,” Wong mentioned, turning his ideas to the performs, “it’s not simply the trauma they bear in mind. It’s a stupendous sundown that they bear in mind. It’s a time once they might loosen up collectively. It’s a time once they weren’t in competitors for one thing…Everyone remembers that, sooner or later, that’s the factor that was misplaced.”
Alexandra Pierson (she/her) is the affiliate editor of American Theatre.
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