Theatre Two plays depicting the lives of Samoan women will bring laughter and some tears to festival audiences.
Two stage works depicting the lives of Samoan women will bring laughter and some tears to festival audiences.
When award-winning Whangarei playwright David Fa‘auliuli Mamea’s mother started lavishing love and care on a pumpkin, the family took notice. She was saving it for a special occasion.
“When my sister told my wife, she immediately said, ‘That woman needs chickens.’” The next time they were in Wellington, they bought her some and built a coop. “It was that time when the family had left and before the grandkids arrived. She was lonely. Even though my father was there and needed her attention, my wife could see that my mother wanted to love something actively.”
Her simple routine of caring inspired the play Still Life with Chickens, premiering at the Auckland Arts Festival before heading to Palmerston North and Wellington. “The central role, Mama, is about her coming to terms with her life and the choices she made that she has very quietly carried within herself. When things happen, she has to deal with her own mortality, but not in such a direct way.”
It is a largely one-way dialogue between Mama and the chicken, played by a puppeteer. Her husband speaks to her from off stage, mostly in Samoan, yelling instructions – telling her that he is hungry, that he wants to be fed, that it’s lunchtime. Mamea says he loves the use of the chicken as a character, but it behaves like a normal backyard chook – “scratching around, attacking the garden and getting into trouble and, yes, always wanting to be fed. And that is like catnip to an old Samoan woman.” Nevertheless, it is an agent of change, providing a sympathetic ear, and at other times acts as confessional. “She reads into its behaviour what she wants and what she needs.”
The character of Mama (played by Goretti Chadwick) has similarities to Mamea’s mother. She emigrated from Samoa in the
“One thing that surprised me in my mid-twenties was realising that my parents were at one time vigorous sexual beings.”
1950s, was working class and raised kids. “One thing that surprised me in my midtwenties was realising that my parents were at one time vigorous sexual beings. That took a long time to process, and it’s nice to have gone through that and put it into this play. When we see these elderly people, we forget they had passion and drama in their time.”
The work is a departure from previous plays, which focused on diversity: Pasifika men serving in the Māori Battalion in WWII, “an ethnic minority within an ethnic minority”; and a road trip to Wellington by four friends – Māori, Chinese, Samoan and Tongan, but all New Zealand-born. “I make sure my characters are the colours of Benneton, to reflect what I see. To get a different palette of colours on stage, it’s important that the story and ethnicities feel natural and real.”
Mamea says Pasifika theatre has moved beyond immigrant arrival tales. “They are just stories like anything else, but from a Pacific perspective. Still Life with Chickens is a universal story about a lonely human being, and then the layer that she is Samoan, and then the other layer that she is a Samoan in New Zealand.”
Still Life with Chickens, by DF Mamea, Auckland Theatre Company, Auckland Arts Festival, Māngere Arts Centre, March 8-14; Cube Theatre, ASB Waterfront Theatre, March 17-24; Centrepoint Theatre, Palmerston North, April 7-15; Circa Theatre, Wellington, May 8-June 2.