Hawaiian Pidgin Theatre

Author(s): Dennis Carroll and Elsa Carroll

Source: Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1976), pp. 56-68
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3205961 .
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DENNIS AND ELSA CARROLL

Hawaiian Pidgin Theatre

Ever since the birth of naturalism, the connection between the theatre and the
life outside it has been primarily forged not by relevance of theme nor "truth" of
characterization, but by language.1 Argots of social or sexual minority groups have
proved a vital staple both in keeping naturalism viable and in providing additional color and definition to the more presentational theatre styles; more broadly used
dialects and variants of standard English speech, skillfully employed rather than
blatantly exploited, have brought theatre forms and styles closer to the "man in the
street."
Hawaii is unique among American states for the unusually diverse strains of ethnic and cultural identity that it harbors. Basically, however, there are only two
groups in Hawaii. These are the locals, people who were born here or who have lived
here from their formative years, from whatever racial group, and nonlocals, people
comprising a spectrum from those who have chosen to live here later in life to the
latest busload of Japanese tourists disgorged from Honolulu International Airport.
In the former group, a strongly unifying factor is their ability to use and understand pidgin.
What is popularly called Hawaiian Pidgin is no longer a true makeshift language,
as it was during the early history of English and American influence. This original
mixture of English and Hawaiian developed into a variety of pidgin dialects from
1877 when major immigrant waves started arriving first from China, then from
Portugal, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. With Hawaii-bred generations, the national elements of these speech forms levelled out, and a cross-cultural English-based creole language emerged. The present "pidgin" is a further
development still, a regional and social variety of English very different from mainland dialects in both linguistic and social history.2
For years the focus of disdain and hostility from local educators, pidgin had a few
scholarly defenders; recently a lot of expert linguistic attention has been lavished on
Dennis Carroll is a member of the faculty of Drama and Theatre at the University of Hawaii. Elsa
Carroll holds an M.A. in Linguistics from Northwestern and teaches at Helsinki Summer University.
1 For example, is was dialogue that primarily touched off both the
delights and horrors of audience
recognition associated with the premiere of Synge's Playboy of the Western World; see David H.
Grene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge (New York, 1959) PP. 235-37. Similarly, direct speech
passages were associated strongly with the notoriety that greeted many naturalistic novels-for
example, Zola's L'Assommoir; see F. W. J. Hemmings, Emile Zola (London,
100-02.
p953),PP.
2
Two major books detail different facets of language development in Hawaii: Da Kine Talk,
From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii by Elizabeth Ball Carr (Honolulu, 1972), and Language
and Dialect in Hawaii, A Sociolinguistic History to 1935 by John E. Reinecke, edited by Stanley
M. Tsuzaki (Honolulu, 1969). Both contain voluminous speech samples.

57

56 / ETI, March 1976

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Reunion,KumaKahua,1974. Photoby JamesC.W.Young.

58 / ET], March 1976

it. Linguists now commonly talk of pidgin as a dialect, or a member in a series of
coexistent language systems, or a part of a language mastery continuum with countless overlapping systems." For our purpose, the last approach is perhaps the most
useful. All locals, regardless of ethnic, economic, and educational background, move
somewhere along a language mastery continuum between the heaviest pidgin
variants and the neutral American standard. Different speakers display different
degrees of mobility on the continuum, and everybody's ability to understand speech
varieties on it exceeds his ability to use them. "Most of the residents of Hawaii are
capable of speaking good English but cling sentimentally to Island dialects as a
unifying element. . . which they use more as a symbol of belonging than as
communication per se."4
Pidgin may be the instrument that can forge a genuinely multi-racial Hawaiian
popular theatre. In January 1975, one of the local theatre groups had turn-away
houses for a play employing only pidgin from beginning to end-Twelf Nite or
Wateva! based on Shakespeare. The audiences, largely composed of locals, gave a
spontaneously delighted reaction. Twelf Nite moved expertly and widely on the
pidgin culture and language continuum. Syntactic and morphological characteristics
of hard-core pidgin were abundant, such as peculiar negative constructions and frequent omission of linking verbs, certain prepositions, and inflectional endings. Liberal sprinkling of Hawaiian and other loan words and idioms localized the vocabulary, and common sound substitutions were suggested in the script.
A strong interest in indigenous theatre first manifested itself in Hawaii in 194648; it was fostered by the Honolulu Community Theatre and its then Assistant Director John Kneubuhl. Kneubuhl had come to Hawaii from Samoa to be educated at
the age of twelve; from December 1946, he wrote frequently of the need to create an
indigenous local theatre and promulgated the slogan "Pacific plays for Pacific playwrights."" He planned to start a workshop for theatre in Kalihi, an inner city
suburb, in which "local talent" could "evaluate its social heritage."'6
Kneubuhl's conception of "indigenous theatre" clearly did not center on contemporary pidgin theatre, but included historical and legendary subject matter of the
whole Western Pacific basin.7 At the same time, he seems to have realised the ex8 A recent interpretation of various classification systems and the present situation is given by
Richard R. Day: "Decreolization: Coexistent Systems and the Post-Creole Continuum" in Pidgins
and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects by David De Camp and Ian F. Hancock, editors (Washington, 1974), PP.
a young local college student of Japanese ancestry quoted by Andrew William
4 Statement by 38-45?
Lind, "Communication: A Problem of Island Youth" in Social Process in Hawaii 24 (1960), 44-53.
Reproduced in The English Language in Hawaii: A Book of Readings compiled by Stanley M. Tsuzaki (Honolulu: Department of English as a Second Language, University of Hawaii, 1971), pp.
90-99.
5 John Kneubuhl, Program Note to his play Harp in the Willows, produced by the Honolulu
Community theatre, February 1947, P. 12.
6 John Kneubuhl, "Honolulu Community Theatre-A Preview," Paradise of the Pacific, 58 (December, 1946), 13.
7 This broader conception of "indigenous theatre" has always received more attention from local
playwrights and theatres than the kind of theatre which is the subject of this article. Many of the

59 / HAWAIIAN PIDGIN THEATRE

pressive potential in the language and life-styles of the various ethnic minority
groups in contemporary Hawaii. He wrote: "We want to have a far greater representation for the various groups that make up island society, and we hope for the day
when they can appear solely in plays for them and by them."8 His second play to
deal with local subject matter, The City is Haunted, made quite extensive use of
pidgin and treated contemporary subject matter with surrealist overtones. It was
produced by the Honolulu Community Theatre in December 1947. The major theme
of the play, according to one sympathetic reviewer, was the psychic haunting of
post-war Honolulu society by the ghosts of the dead and the guilt of the living.9
Kneubuhl set the play in a downtown park, and this setting enabled him to use a
somewhat kaleidoscopic structure and an interesting social tapestry which included
a group of Hawaiians, a group of children, and a group of Nisei soldiers. The main
dramatic emphasis, however, fell on the moral and philosophical conflicts between a
psychiatrist and a doubt-torn minister. At the climax of the play, the minister's
neurotic sister attempted to shoot the psychiatrist, but the minister interposed his
own body. Most of the pidgin dialogue occurred between a Hawaiian mother and
her communist son, and between the Nisei soldiers who appeared from the Minister's unconscious. It is curious, if perhaps understandable, that the reviewers from
the leading Honolulu dailies did not mention the use of pidgin.
At this time there were two other theatrical events that helped to make the period
1946-48 the high water mark of pidgin theatre before quite recent times. One was
again the work of Kneubuhl, the direction and pidginization of a Broadway flop
about army life, Harry Brown's The Sound of Hunting, which was presented in
1948 for the 442nd Veterans' Association in Honolulu." The other was the University Theatre's presentation of a short pidgin play, Bessie Toishigawa's Reunion, on
May 7th, 1947. Director Joel Trapido remembers that every night there was an embarassed but delighted laugh from audiences who were hearing the speech that many
of them used in everyday life coming from a stage for the first time.ll In the early
195os the University staged a few more pidgin plays written for playwriting classes
or playwriting competitions, including Country Pie by Clara Kubojiri (January1953)
and Ripper Revolts and the Malo Maker by Kuuana Bell (January and October 1953
respectively).
plays have been historical or legendary and have attempted a highly questionable reconstruction
of pre-Cook Hawaiian society. And many of them have been unintentionally demeaning to the
vanished Hawaiians by having them speak in pretentious iambics or other Europeanized verse
forms.
8 John Kneubuhl, "A Letter to a Broadway Playwright," Paradise of the Pacific, 59 (December,
1947), 68.

Sj. Leslie Dunstan, "The City is Haunted," The Friend, 118 (February, 1948), 7-11, 32. Other
reviews appeared by Clarice B. Taylor in the Honolulu Star Bulletin, 12 December 1947, p. 14, and
by Edna B. Lawson in the Honolulu Advertiser 12 December 1947, p. 16. The description of the play
given here is compiled from these three reviews; attempts to locate the original script have not
been successful. It is not lodged in the archives of the Honolulu Community Theatre, nor in the
Hawaiian and Pacific Collection of the University Library. The playwright himself has no copy.
Conversation with John Kneubuhl, Honolulu, April
o10
1975. 1975.
11 Conversation with Joel Trapido, Honolulu, Hawaii, April

60 / ETI, March 1976

But the interest in pidgin plays died away. Between 1953 and 1971 there seems
to have been only one pidgin play given public production, Edward Sakamoto's In
the Alley, part of a program of one-act plays at the University Theatre in October
1961. There were a number of pidgin plays written which were too slight in theatrical qualities to warrant production; there were a number of imported plays done in
which standard dialogue was inadvertently pidginized by local casts; but there were
no other plays performedin which pidgin was the sole means of expression.12
There are several possible reasons for this decline. Pidgin at this period was
definitely discouraged as a means of reputable social intercourse. The dlite "English
standard schools," established since 1924, accepted only students who passed an
examination in standard English; this exam was sometimes a rationalization for
Most important
racism on the part of members of the haole-white-oligarchy.'3
educational and theatrical authorities in the islands gave no special encouragement to
pidgin theatre. Willard Wilson, a teacher of playwriting at the University, in whose
class Reunion was written, had the opinion that "contemporary folkways, as exploited, for instance, in the pidgin English of Miss Toishigawa's play" were "an interesting but comparatively shallow source of material," and disapproved of attempts to encourage indigenous theatre.'4 Kneubuhl left the islands in 1949 for a
television career in Los Angeles, and by 1953 the Honolulu Community Theatre's
interest in indigenous theatre had abated, and has never consistently revived.15
Another difficulty has always been that pidgin has no standard orthography; playwrights have been particularly at a loss for ways to indicate metric peculiarities of
pidgin.'6 In the 1950s and 1960s, the successful drive to statehood, the massive
physical development of Hawaii, and the concurrent population explosion deemphasized local traditions.
In 1971, a small theatre group called Kumu Kahuan' was formed at the University for the purpose of presenting only locally written plays; in its programming,
there has been a steadily increasing emphasis on pidgin material. In the first season,
12 All the plays mentioned here are preserved in the unpaginated typewritten volumes, in three
series, in the Hawaiian and Pacific Collection of the Sinclair Library, University of Hawaii. The series
are College Plays 1938-1954, Volumes I-io, edited by Willard Wilson; University of Hawaii
Plays, 1958-1971, Volumes 1-11, edited by Edward A. Langhans; and Theatre Group Plays, 19461969, edited by Edward A. Langhans. The latter series includes information about all productions
of the plays in the volumes by the University Theatre from 1947 to 1969.
13 The word haole is now used for a Caucasian person, regardless of his nationality. For more
information about the English standard system, see Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social
History (New York: 1961), pp. 273-79.
14 Foreword to College Plays II (1946-47).
15 The fact that the HCT has performed no plays written in any kind of pidgin rendition since
The City is Haunted was confirmed by records and reports of the theatre lodged in the Hawaiian
and Pacific Collection of the Sinclair Library, University of Hawaii, and in a conversation with Newell Tarrant, director of the theatre since 1962.
16 The library copy of Kuuana Bell's The Malo Maker, for example, has an author's note that he
wrote dialogue in standard English but meant it to be delivered in pidgin. Opposite each page, there
is a transcript in which someone has attempted a pidgin orthography for the lines. (Theatre Group
Plays IV (1953-55).
17 This is a Hawaiian phrase meaning "original stage" or "original platform."

61 / HAWAIIAN PIDGIN THEATRE

Chuck Chuck's Take It As It Is Or Lump It dealt with the alienation of two local
youths employed in the tinsel world of Sears at Christmas time. In the second season,
another play by the same playwright, Excerptsfrom a Nonexistent Play, coped again
with the theme of locals in an alien environment; a pair of lovers was shown moving
through a surrealistic nightmare of home, factory, school, and mental institution.
The second season also included a performance of Marshall Doi's Crack in the Pot,
a study of city and country locals drinking in a city apartment and building resentment against an absent haole roommate of one of them. In the third season, there
were very successful revivals of In the Alley and Reunion, and in the fourth the presentation of Twelf Nite. Kumu Kahua also presented an improvised program of short
plays in pidgin called Da Kine Kyogen. These were contemporary reworkings of
several Japanese kyogen, short farces which usually deal with relationships between
masters and servants. Directed and devised by Catherine Heacox in the spring of
1973, the sketches sometimes presented a beguiling fusion between traditional
form and modern content. In May 1975, a series of short sketches called Kapakahi
("Mixed up") relating to contemporary Honolulu life were devised by a student cast
for Kumu Kahua's presentation under the direction of Sara Edlin. The majority of
these were in pidgin.
A milestone in the development of pidgin theatre may prove to be the formation
in March last year of Hawaii's first improvisational pidgin group, Booga Booga. The
title is a coined pidgin expression meaning "oil, grease," the inspiration coming
from a Bob Hope comedy catch-phrase in Road to Zanzibar.'8 At first the group
consisted of eleven people-six actors, a band of four, and a technical man-but
is currently functioning without the band and with a reduced collective of three local
actors.
The group satirizes local life styles. The twenty sketches which form the current
repertory are all in pidgin. Few of them have been written down; most are developed
from improvisations, set, and kept in the repertory until better ones are devised. The
group normally performs at the Territorial Tavern, which caters mainly to locals
and island residents. When the band was used, it helped to link the sketches together
musically, but the numbers were standards. Now the exclusive linking device is
pidgin commentary by actors Ed Kaahea and James Benton. With the acting company reduced to three, there is much more spontaneous improvisation in response to
a specific audience. For example, if the group discovers that there are many local
Portuguese in the house, then the pidgin and the jokes are selected from stock for
that group. Often individual audience members add their own jokes and participate
in their own way.
While some of Booga Booga's sketches contain satirical digs at local value systems
and life styles, some are farcically innocuous "tall stories." Two examples of the former are the sketches entitled "Herman and Myron Go Cruising" and "Try Make."
In the first, two local boys go "cruising" down the main street of Waikiki, looking
for haole "chicks," blowing up prophylactics like balloons, and making fun of Jap18 Conversation with Edward Kaahea, Honolulu,
April,
.975.

62 / ETJ,March 1976
anese tourists. A policeman arrests them, but releases them again when he finds that
one is a graduate from his alma mater-Kamehameha School, an institution that
only admits students who can prove that they have some Hawaiian blood. The
sketch effectively evokes the double-edged sword of cultural intolerance. "Try Make"
is a satire on local television, specifically the game show called Diamond Head. A
truck driver and a dope addict are the contestants, and the grand prize a two-week
vacation-in Bermuda. In an earlier version of the sketch, Pamela Viera played a
tita'9 advertising herself on a commercial.
Aloha, my name stay Irma.Eh, if you need won wife, o da kine companiono you stay
da kine lonely, eh, moa bettah you go stay talk wit somebody-Eh, you know wat,
you can purchaseme.-As right-Kapakahi Tita ServiceInc. get all kine models foa
choose from.... You going to get one special guaranteeon me. Two and won haf
montso treekids,which eva cumfirs.20
As an example of a farcical tall-story sketch "Portuguese Man of War" is typical.
Here, a sea battle between a Portuguese submarine and a Hawaiian flotilla for the
possession of the Eastern Pacific is graphically enacted, the small cast using many
hilarious transformations.21
At least two of the short plays written since 1946 deserve to be more widely
known than they are, Bessie Toishigawa's Reunion22and Edward Sakamoto's In the
Alley.23 Both have been produced at least twice. The most interesting full-length
play in pidgin is James Benton's Twelf Nite or Wateva!, the presentational surrealism of which forms an illuminating alternative example of the theatrical use of
pidgin.
Reunion is set on the sidewalk outside the Miyamoto home in Kaimuki, a middle-income, predominantly Japanese, hillside suburb of Honolulu; the time is a Sunday morning in 1947. Takashi has left the house after a slight argument with Miyo,
his older sister. His buddy Masa joins him and the two men talk about their problems. Both are veterans of the heroic Nisei 442nd battalion, and both feel depressed
and dispirited by the anticlimactic amorphousness of their new civilian identities
and their fading prospects of self-realization. As they talk, they are joined by other
vets in the neighborhood-the ebullient Jits, the laborer Duke, and the handiPidginword meaning"toughlocal girl."
Quotedby permissionof authorEdwardKaahea.
21Pidgin has been of marginal importancein non-legitimate forms of theatricalpopular entertainment,particularlyconcertsand nightclub acts. At least since 1970, the frequencyof the use of
pidgin in such entertainmentdepends on the location of the venue and the numberof locals that
the performergauges are in the audience.Even when the audience is predominantlytourists, informal pidgin exchangescan take place between, for example,an entertainerand a memberof the
band. Most entertainersinclude in their acts a colloquial Hawaiian phrase or expression for the
titillation of tourists. Recently,however, perhapsbecauseof the rising tide of local ethnicity, more
bands and local performersinclude pidgin patter and jokes in their acts, notably the comic performerZulu, the band CountryComfort,and the "sophisticatedtita" MelveenLeed,who advertises
eveningsof song and "telling storieslocal style."
19
20

22 In College Plays II (1946-47). These collections of plays are not paginated; so in the following

we do not footnotequotationstakenfromeitherReunionor In the Alley.

23 In Theatre Group Plays, VIII (1961-63).

63 / HAWAIIAN PIDGIN THEATRE

capped Shig. The others kid Masa about his overseas flirtations and the spirits of the
group pick up as they share memories about past campaigns and fellow soldiers.
Miyo invites them into the house but they hesitate until her more attractive younger
sister Teruyo returns home with her mother. Before they join the others inside,
Takashi and Masa decide to make a dream of going to mainland medical school a
reality.
At the time of the play's first production, a reviewer complained of a "monotony"
in the play,24 but in fact it has a finely calculated forward movement deriving from
the character interaction of Takashi and Masa and what they come to realize about
themselves. Takashi is aimless and dissatisfied; after a year "in civvies," he is not
working. He has lost his girl to another because of the call-up, has had many flirtations with different training programs and careers, none of them leading to anything, and he is constantly criticized and bullied by his older sister and father. Masa,
on the other hand, is firmly committed to a career in medicine, but is "pounding
nails" because he is letting half-invented responsibilities to his parents postpone
his objective of studying in Michigan. Nevertheless, as they come to realize, they
are alive, unlike some of the soldiers they still remember; they are in one piece, unlike Shig, who has a permanently damaged leg; and they are educated and educable,
unlike Jits and Duke. These crucial realizations about themselves make them newly
aware of their potential; and, by implication, make them recognize the sidewalk
sessions of stag reminiscence as the enjoyable but useless rituals they are. The
real reunion is not that on the sidewalk, but their own reunion with their ideals,
their self-development, and their future.
This theme is not stressed by the playwright, but is implicit in the action in the
best tradition of naturalistic playwriting. Perhaps it could have been emphasized by
fuller characterdrawing of some of the secondary figures, but this emphasis is partly
provided by the way pidgin is used.
There are two degrees of pidgin in Reunion, and this thematically underlines the
tension between the individual and the group, between private and public identity,
that runs through the play. The opening scene between Takashi and Masa differs
little from standard American in its language, and the pidgin usage is light; the talk
is serious and intimate and involves both friends dropping their social masks. Some
of the talk is almost stilted in its confessional linearity:
TAKASHI: What the hell's the matterwith me anyway? ... My sis bawls me out
'cuz I smoke too much-two packs a day; my old man nags and nags;
and my mom-she pities me too much-all she does is stick up for me.
You know. Masa, I ask myself over and over again, what do I want,
and still I can't put my finger on it.
Once the others gather, the talk loosens up, becomes more casual and rhythmic. A
much heavier degree of pidgin is used, especially by Duke and Shig, the least educated of the characters. This is demonstrated for example by Shig's reminiscences
from an army hospital:
24 Alladine Bell, Honolulu Advertiser, 8 May 1947, P. o10.

64 / ETJ, March 1976

SHIG:

Boy, I had good fun in da hospital .... One nurse especially ask me
e---rytime, "go sing, go sing." Den she brings me candy and all kind
stuff. Boy, her keed sista was some peach! Mama mia!

In addition to using idioms and grammatical peculiaritieswhich pidgin legitimately

offers, Miss Toishigawa adds phrases of Italian the men have picked up on their
overseas campaign, and short snatches of Japanese conversation with the women of
the Miyamoto household. But most interesting of all is the way that the educated
charactersTaka and Masa adjust to this heavier level of pidgin. They do so easily and
naturally, thus subconsciously acquiescing in the social-group identity established
for them by the others. This can be illustrated by similar sentences used by them in
the earlier and later part of the play. For example, Masa says to Taka early: "You
said you wanted to go to Illinois," and to Shig later: "I thought you going art school
in N.Y." Taka says to Masa early, speaking of an ex-girlfriend: "She's living with
her in-laws over in Hilo," and later answers Duke's question "You sister married?"
with "Nah. She going be old maid."
In the Alley is. a much more conventionally crafted piece, a melodrama. The
play takes place on a Saturday night in an alley in downtown Honolulu. Two local
Filipinos, Manny and his thirteen-year-old brother Jo Jo, share their dreams of getting "off the rock," and going to the mainland to open a service station. There they
think they will be able to earn such material goods as cars and swimming pools that
they think only rich haoles have in their home state. Other disaffected local youths
arrive in the alley, bringing stolen beer and shirts. A gang-like identity develops as
they gripe against their drunken, feuding parents, the evils of the environment they
live in, haoles in general, and sailors in particular. Only Jo Jo tries to take a stand
against the unanimous hostility that builds up as games are played, beer is swilled,
and resentful anecdotes are swapped. Then a haole sailor turns into the alley with a
local girl. The gang hides. They overhear the sailor, whose name is Joe, get the girl's
permission to stay the night at her place. They confront the couple, frighten off the
girl, send Jo Jo after her to stop her getting help, then beat their victim semiconscious
and flee. Jo Jo returns, but as he revives the sailor, the latter's friends race to the scene.
Thinking that Jo Jo is trying to steal something rather than help, they beat him
senseless in their turn. As police sirens are heard, Joe stubbornly refuses to flee. He
stays to "help the kid."
In the Alley is dated in its sentimental liberalism and schematized in structure.
For all that, it plays powerfully in the theatre and is an accurate reflection of the kind
of racial tension and violence which occurs in Honolulu all too frequently, especially
between locals and the military. The most persuasive part of the play is the bitterly
humorous opening section. The gang is neatly composed of members of representative ethnic groups: two Filipinos, a Hawaiian, a Portuguese, and a "cosmopolitan."
Of these characters only two, the Filipino brothers, take on much individuality, but
since Sakamoto is chiefly interested in showing the development of a group attitude and its violent consequence, this is hardly a serious fault.
The fact that all the interactions are highly charged gives In the Alley theatrical
dynamism. The build-up of the play is skilfully achieved through cumulative repeti-

65 / HAWAIIAN PIDGIN THEATRE

tion and through the release provided by ironic humor. For example, Bear twice tells
an anecdote about how some sailors made obscene remarks to local girls at the
beach, and the second time the telling becomes more aggressive and distorted. Jo Jo
twice insists that haoles are people who, like everyone else, must be judged on individual character.Ironic humor results from his strictly pragmatic defense of haoles
the second time, however: he and Manny will have to "get along with them" in order to set up their service station effectively on the mainland. There is humor, too, in
that one of the gang, in spite of his expressed hatred of the military, is considering
joining up as a less bleak alternative to his existence at home. Another factor contributing to the tautness of the play's rising action is the astute alternation between
verbal anecdotes and non-verbal games and activity-anecdotes about the boys'
home lives and stealing exploits are interspersed with Bear's bear-hug of others, the
silent draughts of beer, and a comic arm-wrestling contest between Bear and another
boy.
Pidgin is used with consistency throughout the play. The opening scene between
the two Filipino brothers begins:
JO JO:
MANNY:
JO JO:
MANNY:

Manny, why pop pick on you all the time?

I dunno.No makedifferenceto me. I ain't going stay aroundhere anyway.
Why? Where you going?
I dunno.Maybethe Mainland.I can get one job there.

The degree of pidgin evident here varies little during the rest of the play. Unlike
Reunion, there is little intensification of it when the other characters gather and the
gang spirit builds. Unlike Reunion, too, the pidgin in In the Alley is not connected
1:oany specific thematic function. Neither does it achieve a like prominence on its
own, as in Reunion-there is less emphasis on conversation and more on action and
event. The gang maintains pidgin when it confronts the haole sailor. Pidgin is also
used, somewhat more surprisingly, in the speech where the horrified Jo Jo, alone with
the bashed sailor, attempts to explain the gang's action. Sakamoto does not seem to
differentiate pidgin variants between the characters. In the 1974 production by Dando Kluever, the actors made up for this by inadvertently supplying some degree of
differentiation from their own backgrounds, albeit different from the characters'.
The actors also made effective use of the alternation between the verbal and the nonverbal games and activity already mentioned, prompting one local reviewer to remark: "A language is more than just a way of tacking words together. 'Local'
dialect not only has its own grammar and melody, but its own special body stances,
facial expressions, gestures, and emotional intensity. The boys have got it down
perfectly."25

In both these plays, the pidgin emerges most colorfully and spontaneously
through a group assertion of social identity when a haole authority figure is not
present. In both plays, the group drifts on stage without much overt motivation,
which is naturalistically acceptable given the context of the close-knit neighbour25 KarenPryor,HonoluluAdvertiser,17 May 1974, SectionB, p. 8.

66 /

ETI, March 1976

r
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The dual between Waha and LaheIa. Twelf Nite. Photo by James C.W. Young.

hoods in which the plays take place and the weekend settings of the actions. And
in both plays, the most articulate and sensitive members of each group need to test
the validity of their values and identities in a wider social context; both Masa and
Takashi in Reunion and Manny and Jo Jo in In the Alley want to get "off the rock"
for at least a while. This need for locals to prove themselves elsewhere is not nearly
as widespread now as it was when these plays were written, and the attitude
forms a contrast with the celebration of ethnic identity and localism implicit in the
most successful full-length pidgin play thus far, James Benton's Twelf Nite or Wateva!
Illyria, especially with its apocryphal sea coast, is a marvellous theatrical equivalent for the Hawaiian islands. In Twelf Nite, Illyria's inhabitants became transformed from aristocrats and servants into d6class6 alii'" and their charming employees and hangers-on. What resulted was a surrealistic fairy tale. The mise en
schne of the production suggested the sporadic localization of the Elizabethan stage
-an arrangement of potted Samoan palms and benches covered with tapa cloth.
The costumes sometimes suggested the nineteenth century, but this was contradicted
by incongrous contemporary touches-Mahealani (Olivia) wore a black dress and
26 Hawaiian nobility.

67 / HAWAIIAN PIDGIN THEATRE

Lahaina pearls; Koa (Antonio) wore jeans and a tee shirt; the twins wore hiphuggers; and Malolio (Malvolio) wore a tie and shirt with his thongs, rode a bike on
and off stage, and appeared before his horrified mistress in a bright orange lava lava.
Many of Shakespeare's original lyrics for the songs were retained, but were sung in
a slack key scoring and with Hawaiian falsetto to the accompaniment of a small ensemble which was positioned on a side stage. The opening and closing numbers,
however, were local songs in which the audience was invited to join. They did soat the beginning warily, at the end in a spirit of affirmation of the unity of actors
and audience.
The key to the success of Twelf Nite was not the transposition of the story to a
familiar locale, nor the costuming, nor the music, nor the acting and fine directingthe latter the work of Terence Knapp, a haole emigrd from the British National
Theatre and the RSC who now teaches at the University of Hawaii. The key was the
pidgin. As in the production of In the Alley, it seemed to release the cast physically,
enabling them to create around the words rhythmically original gestures and behavior which appeared absolutely spontaneous. Benton used pidgin with maximum expressiveness, untrammelled by the restrictions implicit in more naturalistic modes
of theatre. At the same time its use was carried out in accordancewith Shakespeare's
character spectrum in Twelfth Night. The most pretentious, inflexible, and studied
characters like Malolio used the lightest pidgin; the most unpretentious and spontaneous characters, like Opu-Nui (Sir Toby) and Kukana (Maria) used the heaviest
and~most free-wheeling. Yet other characters used comically extreme ethnic variants of pidgin, like the ridiculous outsider Waha (Aguecheek), a foreign Filipino
newly come from Manila to woo Mahealani. Benton repeatedly used a tactic of deliberately blaspheming against some of Shakespeare's poetry, first setting the audience
into a misleading mood of sanctification by evoking the original through near-quotation, then comically deflating the mood by an obstreperous burst of pidgin or by a
four-letter word. A good example is his version of the opening of the play:
If music going be da food for love, go play on, gimme mo dan extra,so dat da appetite
going get sick and so make.OOOH, dat strain again. It had one crying beat, and went
come ova my ear like da sweet sound dat breateson one bank of pokalana,stealing
and giving odor. Nuff, pau already.Da buggah not as sweet as was befo. Ho, spirit of
love, you so alive and fresh, dat, if you was da frolickingPacific,I could drink you
all.27
This tactic naturally put a great deal of emphasis on the more farcical aspects of the
original model.
The recent productions of all three plays discussed here were presented by Kumu
Kahua in the 200oo-seat
LaboratoryTheatre of Kennedy Theatre, University of Hawaii
Drama Department. Largely because of its location, this theatre tends to serve students and better-educated, middle-class Honolulu residents. Twelf Nite was a coproduction of Kumu Kahua and the newly-built Leeward Community College theatre,
a 6oo-seat house located at Pearl City, about a forty-minute drive from Honolulu,
27 James G. Benton, Twelf Nite or Wateva!, I, i. Unpublished typescript. Quoted with per-

mission.

68 / ETJ,March 1976
which caters to a more dispersed and less urban audience, stretching from the Nanakuli area to various locations on windward Oahu. Initial performances of Twelf
Nite at Kennedy Lab attracted turn-away houses; performances at the larger house
were to standing room only.
Even with smaller houses for the one-act play revivals, it was clear that all these
productions elicited an unusual amount of empathy and interest among local audiences. The one-act plays produced a somewhat more complex response than Tweif
Nite. This was possibly because the plays, though naturalistic, were set in the past
-a kind of Brechtian "historicization" distanced the audience from total empathy. With Twelf Nite, audience reaction was wildly enthusiastic. Aside from the
quality of the performance, the two most probable reasons for this were that the play
was a surreal fantasy, in which no problems of naturalistic verisimilitude complicated audience response to the language, and that the language was absolutely to the
fore, with all of its most recondite idiomatic potential explored to the hilt, a comic
badge of ethnicity. There were no compromises and concessions made to nonlocal audiences. A community of locals was thus created by the locals on the stage
and affirmed by the locals in the audience who, especially at Leeward, hugely outnumbered the non-locals, for once in Hawaiian theatre treated as second-class citizens. They had to pick up what they could of the unfamiliar talk thrown at them,
and content themselves otherwise with the sight gags, the decor, and their knowledge of the original. Many locals in the audience later stated that they had responded
to pidgin expressions that they had not used or heard since childhood. Some of these
more unusual pidgin expressions were contributed to the script by the multi-racial
company during the rehearsalperiod.
Towards the end of 1~975,there were several signs of the increasing vitality of
pidgin theatre. A pidgin playwriting workshop at the University of Hawaii Drama
Department yielded at least two produceable plays; these will be staged by Kumu
Kahua and Leeward Community College early in 1976. A large scale professional
revival of Twelf Nite, supported with State and Federalfunds, is planned for summer,
1976. Most significant of all, however, is the huge popular success of the Booga
Booga collective-James Benton, Edward Kaahea, and Rap Reiplinger. Opening
again at the Territorial Tavern in August, their act drew huge, turn-away crowds,
comprised more and more of non-locals and tourists. Booga Booga have been placed
under professional management, have appeared in concert with the Firesign Theatre,
and are about to cut a record of their best sketches. If they can survive the transition
to broader commercial exposure without the loss of vitality, they may well form the
medium through which pidgin theatre becomes much more widely known throughout the United States.