A Conversation with Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

Our Past is Only Yesterday:
A Conversation with Playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
by Tom Pearson

In my interview with Native Hawaiian/Samoan playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl we spoke of how her experience as an indigenous artist working from within a Pacific Island culture compared with indigenous concerns from the continental United States and Canada, and how her journey as a playwright has stayed true to her original desires to render the power and complexity of women and speak directly to the concerns of her Native heritage.

Tom: Victoria, tell me a little bit about your work and how you became a playwright.

Victoria: Well, I was born in Honolulu, and my father is half Samoan, and my mother is part Hawaiian, so I was born and raised mostly in Honolulu. I went to the same high school as Barack Obama. I know it’s so funny to say that, but anyway, I lived there most of my life, until I was about twelve years old. My mother and father moved back to American Samoa, so I spent a lot of time there, and then I went and lived there for about seven years. I came back to Honolulu, I guess it was in the 70s sometime, and then I went back to school. I got a BA in Liberal Studies from Antioch University, which had a small program in Hawaii at the time. I thought I was going to become a Jungian analyst, so I was going to go into the psychology program at the university. And I thought I’d take a semester off and do something really different. So, I went to sign up for a creative writing class in the English department, but they were full. So I was looking through the catalog of courses, and I saw this class for playwriting, and I thought, “Oh, well my uncle did that. My uncle was a playwright.”

I just stumbled into this class. I’d been to about five plays in my whole life including [one] I was in when I was eight years old. And it was pretty scary. The teacher was, I would say “harsh,” is a gentle way of saying what he was, but I saw myself make so much progress from when I walked into the class and when I finished the class, that I decided to take the class over again with a different teacher, Dennis Carroll, who was there at the university from Australia. He kind of mentored me. He’s the one who had a lot more confidence in my writing than I did, because I didn’t know enough to have confidence. I didn’t know whether my writing was any good or not–but he thought my writing had promise, and I thought he was smarter than I was–so I just followed his lead. And that’s how I started writing, and I was very lucky because there was a theater in Honolulu, Kumu Kahua Theatre, which is totally community based, and they only produce plays that are about our local community, so there are a lot of Asian-American plays. There are a lot of Pacific plays. And they were very hungry for my work right away. You know, my first full-length play was produced at their theater, and right away I got into a cycle of writing and seeing my work produced, which I think is pretty fortunate for a new playwright because so many people struggle for so long to get a reading. But I was able to get into that cycle of writing and rehearsal and production right away, so that really helped me.

Tom: You write about Hawaiian culture. What would you say are the major political and social concerns in your work?

Victoria: I think if you look at the body of my work, that I come back to this theme of how the past collides with and influences the present. I mean, even though some of my pieces, like The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu, is categorized as a historical play, you know, some of those issues that are in the play are still issues in our community today. Was Christianity a good thing or a bad thing for the Hawaiian people? So, I think that’s probably a theme that I keep coming back to over and over again, and it provided for infinite thematic material.

Tom: It seems to be very delicate issues too, and in the play that you mention [The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu] which is having a reading here in the festival, it seems as though you’re walking a very fine line with your treatment of this character, who does sort of shift from one stance about Christianity to a very different stance, incorporating and assimilating that. I wondered if you’d talk a little bit about that character, because she’s real. She’s, first of all, a real historical person of great significance. What were the challenges and concerns in rendering such a well-known and controversial figure?

Victoria: Well, I think that first of all when you look at the period of time that she lived in and acted in, for me, that’s one of the most difficult, aside from the overthrow of the monarchy which comes at the end of the century. We’re looking at the beginning of the nineteenth Century. I think that was one of the most difficult periods of time in Hawaiian history, and the things that those people faced, especially the chiefs who were supposed to guide the people, they had to make some really tough decisions in a time that was very chaotic because there was so much relentless change happening. Depopulation was incredible. You know, when [Captain James] Cook came, they estimated the population at 300,000 and that’s supposed to be low. By the time of this play, the population is about half, so you know fourty years, half the people are gone. And there’s a lot of gunboat diplomacy happening in the islands too. So Ka’ahumanu, as a figure, as a leader, she had to face a world that was changing so quickly. I’m thinking from week to week, it must have been hard and unfamiliar, and I think some people when they look back and want to, you know, criticize her decision to become a Christian, I always think of that analogy of windsurfers out in the water and someone sitting on the beach laughing when they fall off. They don’t know what they are doing. They are not the ones out there having to face those things.

Tom: I love that you mentioned earlier that you were originally pursuing psychology. You treat Ka’ahumanu’s character with a lot of compassion and show these incremental changes in her attitude. Was there anything particularly daunting for you in that? Is she so well known that it’s difficult in some way to take on that character?

Victoria: Well, she’s pretty well known, and any time you write about one of the Ali'i, one of the chiefly class, I think you have to be careful because the Hawaiian community is not all in agreement about everything, and there are different factions. But I think the play was pretty well received as far as the Hawaiian community goes, and I try to do that, to treat her with compassion. And also, what was really important to me in portraying her was, I think sometimes people have the idea that foreigners or missionaries came to Hawaii and kind of led Hawaiians around by the nose. That’s so not true about our chiefs and our leaders, especially her. She was intelligent, and she had a very strategic mind too, so I think that I really wanted people to recognize that our leaders were intelligent and made the best decisions that they could at the time.

Tom: Your plays have been shown in many venues and to many diverse audiences. Is there a difference in the way people react in Hawaii versus elsewhere?

Victoria: I have to think about that for a minute. Yeah. I think there is. I think that when a local audience in Honolulu or Hawaii sees our plays, there’s much more of an emotional connection to the material. And I’m not saying that non-Natives audiences don’t make an emotional identification with the characters. But it’s interesting, for Hawaiian people, the past is yesterday, you know. What happened one-hundred years ago is just yesterday. It’s interesting; it’s so fresh in our minds, and I think we have that connection to the past because our parents and our grandparents feel that connection to our ancestors too. I think, I was going to say that when you’re with a local audience and something sad happens, you are much more likely to see people bursting into tears or making emotional connections with the material.

Tom: Can you tell me why this particular play is the one you selected for this festival?

Victoria: Actually I didn’t select it.

Tom: You didn’t?

Victoria: No, I didn’t. I sent the theater several. I sent them my anthology which had three plays in it. And then they asked for another one that’s not in publication, and I imagine they read the one that was published in the Seventh Generation, which is an anthology of Native American plays, and they selected this play.

Tom: It’s always interesting to hear how certain choices are made because it’s a very diverse festival.

Victoria: I should ask them why.

Tom: Yeah. It would be interesting to know what it was that resonated about this one, at this particular moment. And, what are you working on currently?

Victoria: Well, I just finished a mystery novel. I made a foray into prose, and the novel was just published. It’s set in 1935 in Honolulu. I’m working on a play now tentatively called Aitu Fafine, which is a play about female ghosts, and I wrote a play called Fanny and Belle, which is a play about Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and her relationship with her daughter, Belle Strong. It’s set in Stevenson’s home in, well it’s not western Samoa, now it’s called Samoa. Where Stevenson died. And so I had it in my mind to make a trilogy of Vailima [Stevenson’s home] plays that are all set in this incredible house and in this incredible place. So, the second one is about spirits; I shouldn’t say ghosts, because “aitu” can also mean spirits. Samoa has this incredibly rich tradition of ghost stories and female spirits, and I thought it would be really interesting to write a play that included some of those wonderful female figures.

Tom: Backtracking a little bit, I also wanted to ask you, in terms of your work, who has really been an influence for you in terms of your writing?

Victoria: Well, I did get a masters degree in drama, so I did read a lot of western plays and I think of the western playwrights, those early feminist writers from England like Caryl Churchill, and Louise Page, Pam Gems. I was really excited about their work when I discovered it, and I think The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu reflects some of those values that early feminist theater had, you know, like a play about women, a play about women in different social classes, a play where there’s no really big star but everybody’s part is integral and equal to each other’s part. So those writers were big influences on me. I really love the early work of Sam Shepard because it was so out there. You know, I liked Arthur Miller because he addressed social issues.

But I think one of the biggest influences on my writing was my uncle who was born in Samoa, and he went to the same school I went to. Then he went to Yale, and he was one of the youngest members of that drama workshop there. He came back to Honolulu after World War II and wanted to start an indigenous theater and wanted to encourage local playwriting in the 40s. Then he went to work in Hollywood for about twenty years and wrote all these television shows, but he came back to the theater in his later life. And he really reinforced some of the values that I had about the theater, that it was a place and a venue where we could use our voices to talk about our own culture and our own history, that it wasn’t just a place to be entertained. That it could be a meaningful platform to look at cultural and social issues. And he really believed those things and his writings reflected that too. And I think knowing that there was someone in my family that had done this before me was really important to me. So, I’d say that he’s a pretty big influence.

Tom: And do you see yourself as carrying on this tradition?

Victoria: Yes.

Tom: I know that it’s impossible to really encapsulate an artist’s work in a short interview, but I wondered if you could give us a broad stroke idea of, from your first play to what you’re working on now, what your trajectory has been in terms of the subject matter and issues that you’ve been looking at.

Victoria: In terms of the subject matter and issues, I think you know, because I’m fascinated by the past, I think my first, very first play I wrote, was about the tradition of hula and how the older style of hula was replaced by this new kind of kitschy style of hula and…

Tom: Kind of a little more lyrical, slower hula?

Victoria: The older style, or hula kahiko, is done to chanting, not what westerners would call music. And it’s very, some of it’s pretty bombastic. Some of it’s pretty sedate, but it’s always done to chanting, and it’s not done to any kind of guitar, not to western music. Hula auana, or the new style of hula, is done to music that’s composed for western instruments and western melodies and things like that. It was about a woman coming back and rediscovering that part of herself and realizing that was her path, to preserve and perform that dance. So, I’m not that much farther away thematically, but I think that I’ve got a much wider field in terms of how I use the structure of a play. And I think my field has gotten more and more free as I’ve gotten older. And I always tell my students, you know, you can look at all of these classical rules of playwriting and structures, but actually, what works on the stage is what works. You just have to kind of develop a theatrical sense of what might work or not on the stage. And, I’m still writing about women, which is what I started out really wanting to do, writing about colonization, women in particular; although, I’ve taken some side journeys on certain plays, but you know. I think as a playwright you think you know what you’re writing about, but you just have to leave yourself open to what wants to enter and what is exciting to you and what makes you feel passionate about your work, so like a dancer…

Tom: Yeah. A lot of times you don’t know what it is until it comes and tells you. And it’s really great I think to have the opportunity to have your work read in a festival like this, too, and get to hear it. You know, that’s a very different experience I would imagine.

Victoria: Yes. Well, because we really don’t have a professional theater in Honolulu, it’s great to see these people coming together so quickly and doing such a great job. And it’s wonderful that the theater has brought two of my favorite Hawaiian actresses to be in these roles. I think what that says to me, is that things have come a long way from when I first started writing. Those kinds of things didn’t matter to people.