Sex comedy plays

Theatre

Sex comedy plays to packed house

By Ed Rampell

LAST Virgin in Paradise , the new play by Fiji playwright Vilsoni Hereniko, opened in April to sell-out crowds in Honolulu, and may be the best play about South Seas sex since Somerset Maugham’s Rain.

Like Rain, Virgin has a wicked sense of humor about sexuality, although Virgin is more lighthearted. And as with Sadie Thompson, major characters are Pacific based expats (sexpats?), although Virgin is written by an indigenous author, not a British spy on a secret WWI mission.

Virgin is about Helmut, a German, alcoholic, retired psychology professor in his fifties, who is drawn to the South Pacific because of its “free love” repu tation, but is so crazy that he’s been travelling from island to island, seeking to marry a virgin. At the fictional isle of Marawa, a marriage is arranged between Helmut and the reputed virgin Hina.

Other characters include Temanu, a part-islander who has returned to Marawa from America in order to find her roots and spread feminism. Jean is an Australian anthropologist in a Margaret Mead mode, studying the sex lives of “savages”. Jeke is a Polynesian playboy.

The comedy explores and spoofs the contradictions of contemporary sex in the South Seas, where Pacific promiscuity has often been replaced by Europe’s missionary imposition, so that Western tourists after a lost uninhibitedness are disappointed by religious repression now.

Hereniko has a reportorial instinct in that the playwright is able to look at an issue from all points of view if not impartially. For Hereniko, a Rotuman, definitely has an indigenous take on the characters and story.

Hereniko is very much the star of Virgin, which is loosely based on a true story told to him by Banaban/African- American Teresia Teaiwa. (Hereniko

refuses to tell where the actual incidents took place.) Hereniko wrote, co-directed (with Kumu Kahua Theater’s Gene Shofner), and acts in the play. Hereniko displays comedic gifts as an actor, as well as a playwright, and (conveniently) gives himself Virgin’s best line. Playing an ancestral spirit, Hereniko says he prefers living in hell “because there are no missionaries there”. Surely, this is one of the Pacific’s wittiest gems of dialogue since Sadie Thompson’s, “Men, you’re all pigs!” line (also inspired by a missionary). Virgin is raucous, bawdy, and incorporates Pacific styles, such as Rotuman clowning. Although generally original enough to set Malinowski spin ning in his grave, Hereniko does steal a line from a Woody Allen movie, when Helmut complains that his wife left him for another woman. But the play’s weakest point is the poor performance of Ke’alaonapuahinano Campion as Temanu. Like her character, Campion who has come back from the Conti nental US to Hawaii is, to paraphrase Hereniko’s mentor Albert Wendt, “a daughter for the return home”. But she overacts terribly and is very grating as the confused feminist.

The cast features Pacific Islanders from Fiji, the Cooks, Hawaii, and Tonga, giving Honolulu theatre a rare Oceanic ambiance. Langakali Halapua (daugh ter of Pacific Islands Development Pro gramme director Steven Halapua) is fine in her debut as the tall, slim, long haired cafe-au-lait Hina (a reference to a mythic Polynesian beauty). The 15-year-old merely laughs uproariously when asked if she’s a virgin in paradise. Hereniko, who lectures on Pacific literature at the University of Hawaii, is quick to point out that Virgin is about much more than just sex, a theme, he says, which “Western plays deal more earnestly with”. □

Ed Rampell Sell-out play: Vilsoni Hereniko dressed as an ancestral spirit dances with the cast