Negotiating Contact

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu

November 13, 8pm
Cast: Felicity Jones, Elisabeth Waterston, Jacquelyn Pualani Johnson, Pili Nathaniel, Kim Rosen, Mel Gionson

By Tom Pearson

In her body of work, playwright Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl renders the power and complexity of women and speaks directly to the concerns of her Native heritage. Her play, The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu, which was read at The Public Theater on November 13, 2008, rendered the story of a well-known and highly controversial historical figure for the Hawaiian people, Queen Ka’ahumanu, a pivotal leader who brought about great assimilation between her traditional culture and Christianity during a period of early contact.

The reading, directed by Marie Clements, was stunningly beautiful. While leaving the theater, I overheard several audience members expressing their delight that the reading felt so much like a full production. Wearing simple white muumuus, the Native actors, Jacquelyn Pualani Johnson as Ka’ahumanu, Pili Nathaniel as Hannah, and Kim Rosen as Pali, split center stage among rocking chairs. Meanwhile, the two Westerners of the play, Felicity Jones as Sybil and Elisabeth Waterston as Lucy, book-ended the front of the stage behind music stands. At the very beginning, Mel Gionson, who read stage directions, walked to the front of the stage, turned his back to the audience, and wrote the name of the play on the floor in chalk. This simple act of rendering the queen’s name and the word “conversion” so pointedly, served as a reminder throughout the play of where we had come from and where we were going. As the lines between tradition and assimilation blurred within the trajectory of the performance, so did the chalky names underneath the bare feet of the actors.

The play itself charts the course of the Hawaiian people under the leadership of Ka’ahumanu, a powerful member of the ali'i, or chiefly class, whose rule spanned a period of time during early contact and gunboat diplomacy with the west, as well as an internal overthrow of the established religious taboos, and an incremental inclusion of Christian values and beliefs into the existing system. Motivated by a desire for equality and stability for her people, Ka’ahumanu, rendered with great compassion by Kneubuhl, is easily interpreted through a strong feminist lens. Her breaking of the taboos and her strength in confronting and questioning the missionaries tells a tale not often heard in history classes of the intelligence and diplomacy of the Native Hawaiian women during a time of great turmoil.

Throughout, Johnson’s portrayal of Ka’ahumanu was rich and multi-layered, informed by her study of chant and her use of the Native language, which was spoken in tandem with the English text in the script.

Ka’ahumanu’s incorporations of Christian values, which take place incrementally throughout the story, are shown as nuanced psychological negotiations which cause her to place value on what she witnesses in the missionary women: permission to teach writing, to talk about their god, to sit at the table with their husbands to eat. Yet, the discrepancies are not lost upon her, and she is well aware of the hypocrisies that allow the women to speak of their god, but not give religious counsel. In Act II, scene 7, she admits to Sybil that she sees the good in some of their ways but that her heart still holds back, remembering how the old gods ruled over her in ways she did not like, “So, when I saw a chance, I took them down.” She expresses her fears about how strongly the Christian god holds their hearts saying, “I would never be able to change the beliefs of the people once this god took hold.”

The play is itself a negotiation, seeking reconciliation with what is known of the actions of Ka’ahumanu and what can never be known of her internal struggle to do what was right for her people. In the final monologue of the play, she states, “To think too long on the ways of the past is to ignore the hungry sharks that swim among us.”

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The reading of The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu was followed by a post-performance discussion with playwrights Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, the reading’s director Marie Clements, playwright Diane Glancy and director Betsy Theobald Richards, and centered on the concerns of writing about early cultural contact.

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl began by explaining the genesis of the play, her relationship to history, and the women writers that influenced her. Betsy Theobald Richards and the panelists then discussed history written not only from a woman’s perspective but also from the point of view of the colonized and the power in reclaiming those stories and giving them a more three-dimensional treatment.

The Conversion of Ku’ahumanu Post-Show Discussion
Writing About Early Cultural Contact
November 13, 2008
Moderator: Mandy Hackett (Associate Artistic Director)
Panel: Marie Clements, Diane Glancy, Victoria Kneubuhl, and Betsy Theobald Richards

Mandy Hackett: Let me take a moment to introduce our playwright tonight. Victoria Kneubuhl. Congratulations. It is just such an astonishingly moving piece.I’m so excited to be able to talk more about it. And it's my pleasure to introduce you to our other two panelists, Diane Glancy who is a wonderful playwright, who was featured in the festival last year with her play Salvage… and Betsy Richards who I spoke about earlier from the Ford Foundation and Marie Clements will be joining us in a minute… so thank you all for staying… I’ll get the conversation going. The specific topic we will be talking about is the idea of early cultural contact…It’s a very intense moving piece of theater so I was wondering what your thoughts were about it. I have two questions for you. What inspired you to write about this topic and secondly, what inspired you to write about the topic and subject matter and historical moment through the lens of women?

Victoria Kneubuhl: Well, I had to write this because I was a graduate student and had signed up a course called Independent Study where I was supposed to write a play. At the time, I was a graduate student, I was working at the Mission Houses Museum. I was part of a living history program there, a very adventurous living history program where we, several of us who were on staff went through all these historical documents. We picked people out of the year 1831 and decided we wanted to interpret controversy so we decided we were going to interpret the interaction between the missionaries and Hawaiians in the year 1831. For about three years I put on a costume every weekend and played the role which ended up being Hannah, I was much younger. I was immersed in all of this material at my job…so when it came time to write a play, I decided that’s what I wanted to write about. I think being part of the history program changed my life in a way because it was through performance that I really understood that history happened to real people that it wasn’t just a bunch of facts and accounts in a book. So that’s how I came to write this play. At the time too I was a graduate student, I was taking a course in women and drama and I really admired those early women playwrights in England who wrote plays about women from different social classes, who used the stage to examine social and cultural issues, who made roles for women that were more or less equal and integral to each other on the stage. I always wanted to write about women and I always wanted to write about the place where I came from.

Mandy: This is Marie Clements. And I just wonder if Marie and Vickie want to comment on how the process was over the past two days, rehearsing the work and the rituals, it’s such an intimate piece. How did it get to what we saw tonight?

Marie Clements: I think Vickie really wants to talk.

Victoria: No, Marie wants to talk so badly.

Marie: I’ve been talking a lot of the last couple days probably more than I have in a very long time. How did we get there? …It’s like all processes in theater. We’re in the room. And we all come from different places to be here. Some of us came from Hawaii to be here, some of us came from New York and some of us came from the North so we bring those energies into the room and trying to find the universal truth of the piece, but also very honored to be in a room working on a play that is well written, that is about women, and that taps into issues we’re still dealing with and that’s…what we have a dialogue about…

Mandy: Vickie, is there anything you wanted to add about the past couple days in rehearsal?

Victoria: Well I started having conversations with Marie before I got here, on the phone exchanging thoughts and sending the book.

Marie: Yes. I read the book too.

Victoria: I think one of the really wonderful things was that the theater brought Jackie from Hawaii to perform the role of Ka’ahumanu because Jackie has a very deep love and understanding of her own culture. She has studied chant, she speaks the Hawaiian. I think that was really …and having Pili… come was really wonderful just to have the... I think they helped him with the piece.

Marie: You’re reminded again that just because you’re Indigenous people we don’t all experience history in the same way and so maybe Canada, and even though North America’s the mainland, it’s way different being from Hawaii and that experience. So that was a huge learning curve, but it’s very interesting to know certain things and then know nothing all in one day; over and over again. So, it’s great.

Marie: Betsy, do you want to talk a little bit about your interest in early cultural context and what you saw in the work tonight and how it connects to other ideas or other work that you’re doing?

Betsy Richards: Sure. Well first of all, I want to thank you. It was a beautiful piece. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you, and Marie and the actors for what they gave us tonight. I guess some of the things on my mind, not even particularly in this piece but in this moment of context and why I think Mandy is asking me on the panel about that play, right now that as a funder but also as a theater artist that is working on things, this moment of context is really interesting. Obviously the dominant culture writes the history and there’s a lot to pull apart in there as you said, investigating. But I’m also very interested in not so much in how Europeans affected indigenous people, but how deeply it affected Europeans by their contact. The power of indigenous people was very much played down and there’s this whole mythology around contact and there was this huge thing and artists do plug away, investigate place, it sounds like you were living that through your history job and I’m very interested in the kind of memory and what memory constitutes. What kind of social memory versus family memory and blood memory, ancestral memory…what really happened and how we are people in that sense.

Victoria: I think one of the things that when I was at the living history program it really sunk into me, I think in the generation I was raised in, we didn’t learn our own history, it wasn’t handed out to us in school and I went to a really good school too. It was something I had to go and teach myself. As time went on there were more sources available to me. The one thing that really impressed me, we were kind of taught by osmosis that foreigners, Westerners came to Hawaii and kind of led Hawaiians around by the nose and forced them to do this and forced them to do that. I really discovered that our Lady…and Chief State were really intelligent. They were facing some really hard and difficult challenges and changes and they had to deal with them in the best way that they could and that’s what they did.

Diane Glancy: For the most part it also had a very contemporary feel to it too, why she had the lines, “How do I steer the canoe?” I mean you can ask yourself that each day. I’m kind of interrupting here, with the two women, were those actual diaries or did you write the dialogue?

Victoria: Oh the two missionaries? Some of that I wrote and some of it is from journals. I drew heavily on missionary journals and primary source material from native Hawaiian historians because we do, we are so fortunate we do have a few really good books written by native Hawaiians in the 19th Century also. And I drew a lot on the imagery that I saw repeated in their work too.

Diane Glancy: And whose idea is this written word on the floor? I thought that was really good. Was that Marie?

Victoria: Marie.

Diane: And I know you probably can’t see this but the bare foot prints of the women as they walked across the words. It’s tracked on there, so, I just thought that was brilliant too.

Mandy: Diane, do you want to talk a little bit about the concept of early cultural contact in your work also?

Diane: Well one of my favorite subjects, two of them, is exactly what you do. I think it’s really important to go back and look at history and include those voices that were left out that did not have a chance to speak and to face erasure that we have known…and to put it into a visible form which you certainly have done. And Christianity too; the devastation of Christianity. I mean the missionaries, the other culture brought alcohol and disease and Christianity. I was taking notes from all your wonderful ideas, the devastation of Christianity. I’ve been a Christian all my life and yet to look at the issues, the complexities that you have shown so well in these characters. I deal with that, I mean it, everyday. Without being preachy, which you weren’t and to make it a realistic struggle that goes to the very core of ones being. Congratulations. And the way you present two worlds of irreconcilable differences, they’re never going to fit together. I think that’s another important subject.

Victoria: I made a list once when I was doing something….of Hawaiian values and Western Christian values and boy did they not match up.

Betsy: But you did it with compassion…for both.

Diane: And fairness.

Betsy: Which is very difficult in the amount of pain that the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and the disrespect and the erasure that…actually some of the drama really comes out of if it had been actually comes from respect or missionary women that you show. Even though their words seemed ridiculous and there were moments where the audience laughs, there’s humanity and compassion for all. And their struggle, everyone’s struggle to kind of come to the place…it dramatically makes the choices for the Hawaiians’ charter.

Diane: This play is just so well written…and it all ties together. The missionary woman Lucy, when she had the lump removed from her breast it’s like removed from the Hawaiian women. There were so many reverberations as I listened to this play, I thought, that’s a very well written play.

Mandy: Why don’t we open it up to questions? Do people have questions? Yeah, Sheila.

Sheila: So who was the Hawaiian cast that came in, Jackie and…?

Mandy: Pili who played Hannah. The two actresses came in from Hawaii to do this reading.

Victoria: And Mel’s Hawaiian.

Mandy: New York based.

Mel: Queens!

Mandy: Other thoughts or questions for our panel?

Audience #1: First of all I feel self-conscious. I feel self-conscious because of the unanimity of such extraordinary praise to say anything that might seem critical.

Mandy: Well why don’t you try to phrase it as a question so that we can have a dialogue—

Audience #1:--Can’t do that.

Betsy: We’re looking at you, it’s okay.

Audience #1: The feeling that I had was that the submission to the Christian way was too simply drawn and that the conflict of cultures was not as sharp and as visceral as it might have been. I thought as I was watching this play of Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures where the intrusion of American imperialism on Japan was drawn much more starkly in terms of class and culture and how resistant the Japanese were, that they submitted to become better than. Than we were in terms of production and modernism and so forth, particularly when one of the characters sings Sondheim’s brilliant “A Bowler Hat”. I don’t know if you recall that, so my feeling was I didn’t sense the kind of clash except of the simplistic terms the different play of dressing, the modesty of American women compared to Hawaiian women, some superficial sort of things but no real cultural indication of what the clash was. So I don’t mean disparaging of what you’ve written, but for me, I didn’t sense the kind of significant cultural clash that you had been talking about.

Mandy: Okay. Thank you. Other thoughts or questions for our panel.

Audience #2: Hi. First I want to say ‘Kawaina’, and loved being here and loved the play. Thank you very much for your work. I also want to say I’m writing a historical novel series set in Hawaii that begins a little bit later in 1886, but you can’t deal with any period without the events of 1819. Maybe you’ve seen this-- I think you’ve had better access to source material than I have and it’s just a question I’ve wondered about and reflected so much upon it….Ka’ahumanu with the Liholiho they took out the guts of Hawaiian culture (SNAP) like that at the beginning of…and there may have been many reasons that it went into that…but at some point, I think you alluded to it a little bit in the play, at some point she had to say, “My God what did I do—“

Victoria: --Well.

Audience #2: Because it was a tremendous vacuum and maybe speaks a little bit to your point. There was a tremendous cultural vacuum that the missionaries sailed into.

Victoria: See, I have real problems with the vacuum theory.

Audience #2: Yeah, absolutely.

Victoria: Because …Hawaiians had been seeing foreigners for forty years. And I said this to the cast too, when Ka’ahumanu, and it’s not just her, and it’s not just Liholiho, it’s all of those chiefs, Kamehameha, the Kona Uncles who surrounded him, all of those chiefs, when he died, they wanted to really keep that power consolidated that he had brought. Now I have some problems with whether he should have united the islands or not. I think it would’ve been much more difficult for foreigners to make intrusions on the islands if they had to deal with different chiefs every time on different islands. Instead they’re dealing with one kind of consolidated power. So, I think I said this to the cast too, that when they have that ceremony of eating, when they declare that the gods are going, their religious rituals were not open to common people and they weren’t open to the women chiefs either. They were the men and they were only the big Lhakini temples. The last historic site that I worked at was a Heiau, and there are so many kinds of temples, different rituals, different ways of worshipping that…the common people, the people who weren’t part of the high ali'i rituals, they’re not going to give up their worship like that. That’s why I don’t think there was a vacuum and the missionaries moved in. I think instead, there was…that the chiefs were having a lot of trouble with gun boat diplomacy, and they were having a lot of trouble maintaining their authority in the islands and they needed some help, and of all the available people around them, the missionaries looked pretty good compared to the sailors and the people who were there for nothing but commercial exploitation, and it didn’t happen overnight either—I mean, the play happens in an hour and half but that telescoped five or six years of time. And Liholiho was pretty ineffective as a ruler, the decision to do that, what it did was it got rid of the whole priestly class. Those Kona Uncles and those people who came to power around Kamehameha they didn’t have to deal with the priests anymore. Anyway, that was my lecture.

Audience #3: I would just like to say I saw this play a couple years ago, too, and I’m just thankful to see it again tonight. I think it paints such wonderful complexity and I think perhaps why it may strike some audience as odd because this isn’t a story we’re used to hearing. We’re used to hearing the story about military conquests and clash of the Titans and wars and battles and dates and I love that you’re able to bring in the rich complexity between and amongst these women and that we’re seeing into their hearts and minds and their daily lives in this moment where the political is there and the military is there and it’s surrounding and you hear it in their language but it really brings into the heart of their daily lives which I think is such an important story to tell. You just do it with such complexity and moving beauty.

Victoria: Thank you.

Mandy: Yeah, Gary.

Gary Farmer: I just wanted to as well, address one of the concepts of peace of the Hawaiian people. Having so many of our peoples, and nations, and tribes adapted to the religious because it was easy, it was the easiest way, it was the most peaceful way and we could adopt our concepts and beliefs through theirs. The whole concept of peace in that, how it lived among the people, in contrast to the conflict, was interesting when it actually did conflict which I’m always trying to find it’s way towards peace as a concept for plays as such. When the conflict came that seems generally where the humor came from. We saw contrast between the missionaries and people. So I’m quite fascinated by that, and I thought it was a wonderful job and I the conflict of cultures was probably the strongest conflict we have as indigenous people so in terms of those times. I was curious in terms of a question, what is the situation among the lands of the people of Hawaii today and have the people there seen this piece in Hawaii.

Victoria: Yeah, yeah. We have. You know, talking about the situation of native Hawaiians today could take a really long time, but I think it’s not that good. It could be a lot better. It’s maybe better than it was. I think we represent twenty-percent of our population now and we represent in prisons, we’re fifty-percent of the people in prisons, our health is not good. We can’t give good health report. There are lots of native Hawaiians below the poverty line, so I’d like to say things were more cheerful but they’re not. And at the same time there are lots of Hawaiians that are going to school, educated, trying to do things for their people, and we don’t even have recognition from the federal government that we are the indigenous people of the islands, so maybe that will change. The last administration, of course, was not friendly to that idea, so, we’re hoping this one will be--more friendly.

Betsy: You know what strikes me, is that the state of Hawaii, as far as it’s…and this is where memory becomes important, as you go to Hawaii and everything gets sold as the aloha spirit. Everything is industry, money, is about selling something that people were going there to destroy or to co-, and that’s what struck me--it was something that struck me about the play, the kind of intention, that’s what I meant about the effect of the Indigenous people… is that… for commerce’s sake, obviously this has become something we want?

Victoria: Well, I think the selling of Hawaii would take another whole play to discuss from the beginning of contact. But you know, I think that Hawaii is so strategically located in the Pacific that in the really early nineteenth Century, you see interest from foreign nations because of it’s strategic location and talk about how those islands should be taken because they’re great place to launch or to protect and who took the first hit in WWII. We are strategically located so…I think that’s the first thing to grab and then…you know, it’s very interesting how the tourism industry has kind of overshadowed everything else on the island, as far as the economy goes, to the point where in the daily paper we read, "Oh it’s up," "Oh it’s down." It’s like the stock market. We could talk all night about it.

Mandy: I’m going to take one more question or thought.

Audience #4: It’s not a question. It’s more of a very big mahalo, because there are a lot of Hawaiians on the mainland also kanaka maoli [true person] sort of pop up…that resonates, but I think we can’t have enough of the story of Hawaiian history, we can’t have enough, because there’s still a lot of demystification that has yet to happen in the mainland, I don’t think mainlanders really understands, they can’t get past the grass skirts. And I think that tonight was very special, it was a gift because it was a story from a female perspective, totally female, no disrespect but I think that’s unique and it’s rare and it’s really missing from too much when we tell a story unless you’re sitting with…you don’t have the opportunity. I thank you. I’m sure everybody else does.

VICTORIA NALANI KNEUBUHL (Native Hawaiian/Samoan) is a Honolulu playwright and author. Her many plays have been performed in Hawai`i and the continental United States and have toured to Britain, Asia, and the Pacific. An anthology of her work, Hawai`i Nei: Island Plays, is available from the University of Hawai`i Press. Ms. Kneubuhl's first mystery novel Murder Casts a Shadow, was recently published by the University of Hawaii Press. She is currently the writer and co-producer for the television series Biography Hawaii. In 1994, she was the recipient of the prestigious Hawai`i Award for Literature and in 2006 received the Eliot Cades Award for Literature.

MARIE CLEMENTS (Metis/Dene) is an award-winning performer, playwright, director, screenwriter, producer, and founding artistic director of urban ink productions and Fathom Labs Highway. Her twelve plays, including Copper Thunderbird, Burning Vision, and The Unnatural and Accidental Women, have been presented on some of the most prestigious stages for Canadian and international work including the Festival de Theatre des Ameriques (Urban Tattoo 2001, Burning Vision 2003) in Montreal, the National Arts Centre and The Magnetic North Festival (Burning Vision 2003, Copper Thunderbird 2007) in Ottawa. Her work has garnered numerous awards and publications including the 2004 Canada-Japan Literary Award and a shortlisted nomination for the 2003 Governor General's Literary Award.

Originally published at The Native Theater Journal

Tom PearsonJanuary 26, 2009