A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

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.
122