Between memory and hope: John Kneubuhl and the idea of a Polynesian home

Abstract

Recognized as the “spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre” (Balme 194), John Kneubuhl’s life and work exemplify the transnational and diasporic constitution of Pacific cultures and societies. Kneubuhl was born in American Samoa in 1920 to a Samoan mother, herself the great granddaughter of George Pritchard, missionary in Tahiti and later consul to Samoa, and an American father from Iowa, himself the descendant of Swiss immigrants to the United States. Having grown up in American Samoa and Hawai‘i and studied at Yale, Kneubuhl returned to Honolulu after the Second World War and wrote his first Hawaiian plays for the Honolulu Community Theatre. From 1949 to 1968 he lived and worked in Hollywood as a successful script writer for a large number of popular television shows. In 1968 he returned home to Samoa from where he went on to spend time in Tonga and move back to Hawai’i before a final return to American Samoa, where he died in 1992 on the night that his last play, Think of a Garden, premiered in Pago Pago. Thinking of himself as a Hawaiian playwright (Johnson 109) and of Hawaiians as strangers in their own land (Orr), Kneubuhl’s great theme was the search for home, which he explored throughout a writing career that spanned fifty years. Informed by his own family background and life experience as well as his studies in Polynesian culture and history, he was skeptical toward attempts to reclaim identities and restore lost worlds and instead located home in a mental attitude “between memory and hope” (Kneubuhl 3.2.2), a confrontation and acceptance of loss nurtured by Polynesian ritual and theatrical traditions. In this paper, I propose to show and discuss how this vision evolved in four of Kneubuhl’s Hawaiian plays, The Harp in the Willows (1947), Hello, Hello, Hello (1974), Mele Kanikau: A Pageant (1975) and A Play: A Play (1990), as it was worked into Western dramatic forms to produce a uniquely transnational Pacific theatre. References: Balme, Christopher B. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Johnson, Jackie Pualani. Unpublished interview with John Kneubuhl, Hilo, Hawai’i, 1990. Kneubuhl, John. Hello, Hello, Hello. Unpublished play script. Honolulu, 1974. Orr, Stanley. “‘Strangers in Our Own Land’: John Kneubuhl, Modern Drama, and Hawai‘i Five-O.” American Quarterly 67.3 (Sep. 2015): 913-36.