A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

printed nothing but poems. Sentimental discourse. They failed to use the printed
word for propaganda’ (144).
Endo’s death, however unlikely, is satisfying from the point of view of storytelling:
Sunny corners him in a sewage tunnel. Having loved music and dreaded water, he is
killed by an injection of angel’s-trumpet flower: “She saw him freeze, deafened in the
trumpet’s blare. It would take time. Death would come in slow staccato riffs, piercing cell
by cell, paralyzing limb by limb. […] Then rapids shot his body forward, so the living
brain of Endo Matsuharu saw the ocean waiting in the distance. Red, and boiling, and
patient” (345-6). Keo had played the trumpet, in the instinctive way he had turned to the
ocean. Both music and the sea are here showing their wrathful faces, executing Sunny’s
revenge. With the novel’s metonymic and cathartic ending, Davenport culminates her aim
to rescue the comfort women of the Second World War from oblivion by telling their
story.
Theatre is a conduit into our everyday world through which mystery and magic may still enter. At the same
time, theatre can serve as a powerful platform for examining the social and political issues of our time.
5.1.3 Enacting the Past: Local Historical Drama
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl – on being a playwright 338
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.”
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