Nan Asuncion (left), Leonelle Anderson Akana (center), and Polly Kuulei (right) in Kumu Kahua Theatre's "The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu" by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl. - Photo: Courtesy of Kumu Kahua Archives. - Photo: Mike Uno

Tale of Ka'ahumanu's time
goes to Washington, D.C.

By Liza Simon / Ka Wai Ola

Chalk up another milestone for The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu, a play penned by Victoria Kneubuhl in 1988 when she was just beginning to produce a body of powerful work drawing on her dual Sāmoan and Hawaiian heritage. Conversion will be produced this month at Rasmuson Theater at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Just six months ago the same work was given a reading at the prestigious Public Theater in New York City in a special tribute naming Kneubuhl an outstanding indigenous woman playwright.

In the last two decades, Conversion – Kneubuhl's most produced play, has also toured and found favor with audiences as far away as Scotland. "The drama critic in Edinburgh told me he was deeply touched by the play and its parallels to his own heritage. It never had occurred to me that I would be hearing something like that from a man in a kilt fresh from the Highlands," Kneubuhl said with a modest shrug.

That Conversion has such resonance with audiences should be no surprise. It is emblematic of Kneubuhl's ability to simultaneously explore the Polynesian past and the broader essence of human nature.

Melonie Leihua Stewart as Ka'ahumanu and Debby Andres as Pali during a rehearsal for "The Conversion of Ka'ahumanu." - Courtesy photo by Katherine Fogden

Ostensibly, the drama's plot is about political turmoil and European-introduced pandemic diseases sweeping across the Pacific in the early 1800s, while Ka'ahumanu charted a new course for Hawai'i by turning way from native religious practices and adopting the Christianity of American missionaries. But beyond the facts, Kneubuhl sees to it that her characters confront larger questions about spirituality. Rather than a black and white conflict of western and native values, her drama is nuanced with an in-depth study of mixed motivations and difficult individual choices related to faith. Her Ka'ahumanu, for example, is rendered as ambivalent about the promised salvation in the missionaries' religion, but no less pragmatic about perceiving in Christianity a shrewd advantage for her reign.

Likewise, Kneubuhl's depiction of inevitable clashes of western and native values is not through polemics but through the varied personal experiences of women – all struggling to cope with vastly different expectations thrust upon them by culture and social class, and whose personal temperaments decide their destinies. The humble Sybil Bingham, for instance, becomes an empathetic counterpoint to the judgmental Lucy Thurston. Of great interest is Ka'ahumanu's hapa-haole court attendant Hannah, who struggles to navigate between the oppression of forced marriage to a foreigner and the cruelty of a native custom known as kauā in the Hawaiian kapu system. In choosing their paths, Kneubuhl's characters eventually follow their hearts, not some dogma, suggesting the possibility of a meaningful redemption.

A number of experiences in Kneubuhl's life converged to inspire her to write Conversion, including her enrollment in a university course on women in theater. "I saw so clearly that women have to be written back into history, so that we aren't just swallowing these authoritative histories that do not look behind the scenes of epic events," said Kneubuhl, adding, "I wanted to show how women are often more adaptive and progressive when they find themselves on the hot seat of history."

Closer to home, Conversion is also the product of Kneubuhl's work in the living history program at Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu, which presented public re-creations of a typical "day in the life" of early 19th century missionaries in Hawai'i. While enrolled in the UH theater program, Kneubuhl spent her Saturdays in full-costume portrayal of real-life historical characters. She based her dialogue and action on scrupulous research into archived journals, newspapers and other records. By the time she sat down to write Conversion, she had plenty of information about the real-life antecedents of her characters and their thoughts on colonialism, gender, culture, war, disease and religion – the list of themes that infuse her play.

Kneubuhl believes that history has inherent appeal and is at the core of Conversion's long-standing popularity with audiences around the globe. "People want to hear the voices of those who are no longer with us. It is exciting to realize that these are people who made history and they are no different than us," she said, adding that storytelling rather than facts and figures is a good way to shed light on the past.

In fact, storytelling within her family circle, she admits, has been an ultimate influence on her historical writing, including dozens of plays and television scripts for a PBS Hawai'i biographies series, plus a recently published historical mystery novel set in 1930s Honolulu and a video documentary of Joseph Nāwahī – a 19th century leader of the Hawaiian political independence movement.

Despite her protestations that she chose theater "quite by accident" after first obtaining a degree in psychology, the mo'olelo she heard from her kūpuna left an indelible mark on her imagination. This ranges from the tales of 1950s Hollywood stars from her Uncle John Kneubuhl, a celebrated Sāmoan-born television writer to reminiscences of the Hawaiian Kingdom shared by her Hawaiian grandmother and friends over games of canasta.

"I think human motives don't change over time," Kneubuhl said. "I hope that by studying the past we begin to see some kind of pattern or evolution of human relationships that helps us become more understanding of the world we live in."