Think of a Garden and Other Plays

by John Kneubuhl

By his own reckoning, John Kneubuhl was "the world's greatest Swiss/Welsh/Samoan playwright." The son of a Samoan mother and an American father, Kneubuhl's multicultural heritage produced a distinctive artistic vision that formed the basis of his most powerful dramatic work. Born and raised in Samoa, Kneubuhl attended school in Honolulu and studied under Thornton Wilder at Yale. Returning to Hawai'i in the mid-1940s, Kneubuhl won acclaim as a playwright with the Honolulu Community Theater, then moved on to Los Angeles to write for television. Twenty years later he was back in Samoa, lecturing on Polynesian history and culture and writing plays, including the trilogy offered here. Unlike much of Kneubuhl's earlier work, these plays are touchingly personal in their exploration of alienation and cultural identity. Think of a Garden, the first play of the trilogy and the last written before the playwright's death in 1992, has been called the most Samoan of Kneubuhl's plays--a candid look at the writer's bicultural upbringing that artfully weaves together family memory, history, and mysticism.

Think of a Garden makes the work of one of the Pacific's preeminent playwrights available for the first time to a wide audience of theatre enthusiasts, literature specialists, and others interested in Pacific themes.

280 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1996

Reviews

[Bucket · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm no expert on plays, but I found this collection fascinating. There are 3 plays here, set in American Samoa and Hawaii. All of them are about culture: the tragedy of its destruction, the horror visited by white culture on the cultures (and people) of the South Pacific, and Kneubuhl's urgent message to his people that saving their cultures is still entirely up to them.

Reading these plays on that sociopolitical level was a great experience. But on top of that, these plays are brilliant experiments in metafiction (not sure if that's the right word in the case of a play). Think of a Garden is the most straight-forward of the bunch, but still features the "writer" who is the ostensible author of what we are seeing, and also the grown-up version of the child main character.

The other two plays are about people putting on a play, coming in and out of character, manipulating set dressing, and more author/writer-as-character. The third play (called A Play: A Play) is a play about a play about a man who just wrote a play -- and soon we see that even when the actors are out of character they are still actually in a play... so, fascinating reading from the structural perspective too.