Spirit Island

SPIRIT ISLAND[1]

JEAN CHARLOT

CAST

YOUNG CHIEF

OLD PADDLER

HANAAUMOE, a spirit

SPIRITS

An unnamed Hawaiian Island. Pre-Cook era.

John F. Kennedy Laboratory Theatre

May 11–16, 1964

Spirit Island

by Jean Charlot

Young Chief ...................Lloyd Murray

Old Paddler .....................Marvin Char

Hanaaumoe ......................Calvin Onaga

Spirits....Roy Manzoku, Frederick Mark, Russell Miwa

Scene : An unnamed Hawaiian Island in the pre-Cook era.

Designed and Directed by Amiel Leonardia

SPIRIT ISLAND

Sand dune. Foreground a dead hala stump. Lapping of waves over sand is heard. HANAAUMOE, a flattering spirit, squats on top the dune. Other spirits, seen only head and shoulders, are ambushed behind it. The spirits’ features tend to the featureless, their color to colorlessness. They speak with a rustling sound. Their gestures are bug-like.

SPIRIT 1

I am hungry.

SPIRIT 2

What that last wreck brought, it pretty much wrecked my stomach, or what passes for it!

SPIRIT 3

So long had it been tossing sail-less, that canoe, its cargo was stringy as dried up gourds!

SPIRIT 4

No flesh to chew on to speak of! No blood to suck! No marrow in the marrow bones!

SPIRIT 1

Please, Hanaaumoe, do your stuff. You are a flattering spirit. Flatter them. Bid them land. We are hungry!

HANAAUMOE

No cargo in sight!

SPIRIT 2

A canoe! Westward a canoe!

SPIRIT 3

I see it now, against the sunset!

SPIRIT 4

There it goes, red in the green afterglow!

(All spirits look expectantly at Hanaaumoe.)

HANAAUMOE

(Both hands cupped to mouth in the manner of a loudspeaker. Loud voice, but kept very suave and pleasant.)

Welcome, travelers. We bid you rest here. Here you shall be safe. Lucky winds and currents took you to our shores. What hardships you missed! What frights you skirted! Lucky indeed! Most islands are infested with spirits. Don’t bypass us and drift to Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i crawls with spirits. Kanika‘a lives there! Maui is black with spirits. Pahulu commands them! Moloka‘i is foggy with spirits. Kauholu is their chief! How fortunate chance brings you to our shores. Our Kaha‘ielani is the one island untainted, unblemished. Beach your canoe. Rope it tight. Make sure you rope it tight. Partake of our delights! For the sturdy paddler there shall be two wives. And for the chief, so bravely clad in red, five wives. And much, much food! Come! Land! Rejoice!

SPIRIT 1

Thank you, Hanaaumoe.

SPIRIT 2

We’ll boil them!

SPIRIT 3

We’ll broil them!

SPIRIT 4

We’ll kālua them!

HANAAUMOE

No bickering. We’ll boil the paddler and broil the chief.

SPIRIT 1

The fuel!

SPIRIT 2

The pot!

SPIRIT 3

Hot stones!

SPIRIT 4

The forks!

(All exit, ducking behind the dune. Scraping sound of canoe being beached.

Enter OLD PADDLER and YOUNG CHIEF, both pulling forcefully on canoe ropes. Paddler ties ropes elaborately to foreground stump.)

OLD PADDLER

Safe! All in one piece this ocean. Nights and days we rode its sturdy backbone, bump after bump, vertebra following vertebrae.

YOUNG CHIEF

The earth underfoot feels good after so long!

OLD PADDLER

Luck played into our hands. Honest folks these rustics. How could one doubt their plainspoken welcome.

YOUNG CHIEF

’Tis said wisdom and age go hand in hand, waterlogged optimist. In you I see only age! Do not make fast the knots. I doubt this is Kaha‘ielani.

OLD PADDLER

(Aggrieved.)

You heard it, chiefly fisherman! That voice, it was positively choked with aloha!

YOUNG CHIEF

And the speaker?

OLD PADDLER

He went to fetch the girls. I can hardly wait! Two wives for the old paddler to feel young with! Though what you may achieve with five females, cautious philosopher, remains to be seen.

YOUNG CHIEF

Forget the wives. Philosophizing may come handy, lusty blockhead, should this place fail to be Kaha‘ielani.

OLD PADDLER

When the king your father bid you go fetch a mate, I should have stayed home, in the same fishing craft I’ve called my home since I was weaned. To sink lures and haul in the milk-white octopus, that I know how to do. And to bait with flesh meat the voracious barracudas. Fish, yes. Queens, no. I should have stayed home. Where are we, anyhow?

YOUNG CHIEF

Nowhere we ever were, crusty grumbler. Perhaps nowhere where man has ever been.

OLD PADDLER

Enough said, bridegroom-soon-to-be! Remember: your ailing father bid you go seek a queen, not a monster. Girls are an ornament of the known world. Monsters inhabit the unknown.

YOUNG CHIEF

Why worry, retailer of antique tales. Are not women kin to monsters? And again the wide universe, both its unprobed worlds and ours, it may be peopled just by men begotten of women. A dull thought.

OLD PADDLER

You forget the dragons, sail-propelled tenderfoot. Whosoever came back from there, wherever that is, saw dragons as clear as we see rats or bats. Only, alas, substantially bigger, and fully as frisky!

YOUNG CHIEF

The dragons of the ocean are awesome enough. Landlocked dragons I have yet to meet. Whales with legs, perchance, pounding underfoot the kukui forests! What manner of tusks fringes their hungry jaws?

OLD PADDLER

Enough said or too much, would-be dragon-slayer. What of witches?

YOUNG CHIEF

Nothing good. ’Tis said they change their form at will, an evil will; hunch inside the hollow of a decaying stump to snag the traveler’s weary footfall; command the midnight bat to prick the skin of the pilgrim with its poisoned claw. Witches may foul even the clear water a thirsty sailor scoops up from some beach freshet.

OLD PADDLER

What of ghosts?

YOUNG CHIEF

Nothing bad. A ghost is but you or I. Once ghosts were like us. We shall be like them! Over untold spans of time and eons of space, ’tis a friendly gesture to hold hands with ghosts and melt their snow against our warmth. Comes our turn, it may mean a welcome.

OLD PADDLER

Enough said and more than enough, or much too much, ghost-to-be. Granted that ghosts and men are two of a kind, still men can be nasty. And if so, so can ghosts.

YOUNG CHIEF

A female ghost for queen, what a cool summer sport. Father, though, would hardly approve. The dynasty would wither. She-ghosts are notoriously barren. (Sniffs.) That smell?

OLD PADDLER

What smell? A nose I have for currents and a nose for the winds. None at all for smells.

YOUNG CHIEF

A stink rather. Close enough to bat dung. Closest to clotted, putrid blood.

(Hanaaumoe slowly rises over the crest of the sand dune.)

Whatever happens, don’t contradict me. We may still get out of this alive.

HANAAUMOE

(In a raspy whisper, the exact opposite of his flattering voice.)

You are as good as dead! No way out! In the sea, spirit sharks! On land, us! (Snorts.) Your flesh is consumed. Your bones cracked. Devoured their marrow. Your guts are chewed up. Your blood gulped. Sucked the juice out of your eyeballs!

YOUNG CHIEF

What a wonderful voice you have. Such a very wide range! At one time loud and sweet. At another, hushed and harsh.

HANAAUMOE

(Mollified.)

Don’t mention it. It’s just a trick. It’s throat-deep.

YOUNG CHIEF

I wish I too could do that. I can’t though. My voice is just my voice. (Sighs.) When I was alive, I used to do it.

HANAAUMOE

When you were alive?

YOUNG CHIEF

(Laughs.)

Oh! I see! Don’t let it fool you. This feather cloak, these bracelets and anklets, that skin! (Pinches himself.) Pretence all! No, I am truly dead. So’s my canoe mate. Only we are rigged, so to speak, for a very special errand.

(Spirits rise head and shoulders over the ridge. They carry cooking implements, trident forks, a large pot, a stirring spoon.)

You spirits may be able to help, though live men could not. Bright, brainy spirits. Unborn, never harried by thoughts of death, that sort of a dead end for us mortals. (A light laugh.) Come, brothers, if a dead man may be so bold as to call immortal spirits brothers. Come, gather around us, and I’ll tell you a tale you’ll never forget.

(Spirits hurdle over the dune, lay aside their tools, squat in a circle around chief and paddler.)

Of course, you know we men are made of two kinds, men and women.

SPIRIT 1

In the wrecks that reach us, men only. Tough, these men, in more ways than one.

(Subdued titter among spirits.)

YOUNG CHIEF

Alive, I was in love with a girl, a girl I had never seen. My father, the king, thought me dull, half asleep. Wise sorcerers, famed kahunas, were summoned to diagnose my illness. All remedies failed. I refused to awake. For when I was awake, the girl of my dreams was nowhere to be seen. For my ills, there could be only one remedy, the girl. On what island was she, in which one of the seven oceans, this girl I so dearly loved!

SPIRIT 2

What is love?

YOUNG CHIEF

It’s a funny feeling, like one wasn’t meant for oneself anymore but for another.

SPIRIT 3

That’s what men are for, for other than men.

(A shush from other spirits.)

YOUNG CHIEF

That girl, how I yearned for her. I pined for her.

SPIRIT 4

You were hungry.

YOUNG CHIEF

I hungered for her. Then one day, the king, my father, bid me go to far-flung lands, there to seek a queen. I said, yes, I’d go. My thought was: if I’d touch at all the islands that pock the seas, at last on one of them I’d find the girl in my dreams.

SPIRIT 1

What are dreams?

YOUNG CHIEF

We men, we know death, that is true, and you don’t. Maybe to dream and to die, man’s lot, balances your own lot of no death and no dreams. We roamed through five of the seven oceans. We beached our canoe on hundreds of beaches. White sand, black sand, yellow sand. Surfs high and low. But the girl was not there. We entered the sixth ocean, and only whales were brave enough to follow, consolingly nudging our hull. As we sighted the seventh ocean, stomach failed even the whales. They turned back.

SPIRIT 2

What happened?

YOUNG CHIEF

Another island. It was lush with hala forests so thickly lashed by their roots to the soil that their cordage wove mats that hid the earth. Trails crisscrossed this jungle, made of footprints each bigger than the cozy circle we make. The footfalls had mashed trees and rocks into pulp, so heavy was the marcher. Then we saw the foot and, attached to it, the beast. A dragon. Dragons all over, big as cliffs, their skin slippery as seaweed, necks ringed like palm trunks and taller than the tallest. Tipped with heads no bigger than a sea turtle egg. But the tongue that shot out of that head, it was longer than the neck, blood-red and spear-tipped.

SPIRIT 3

They ate you?

YOUNG CHIEF

We didn’t make a dent in their attention. They were busy browsing on the pili grass.

OLD PADDLER

O late chief, how well I remember the next island we reached. Tell them what we found there!

SPIRIT 4

What did we find there?

YOUNG CHIEF

It was rather pleasant. Witches befriended us. To please us the dry hags changed themselves into saucy girls. For a while a good time was had by all. But when they danced, their old bones rattled inside their young skins. There’s a limit to what witches can do.

OLD PADDLER

And the next island, chiefly ex-man, tell them about it!

YOUNG CHIEF

Old nobody, your memory fails you, just as it used to when you had a body. There was no other island. Instead a giant wave propelled by the belch of an undersea volcano sucked under our canoe. Auwē! Miles down we went, to our death, for man a major change of life.

SPIRIT 1

What is a change of life?

YOUNG CHIEF

Another thing you don’t have. One we could do without. We men live three lives, you spirits one only. Man, as he thinks of himself, striking a brave stance face to the sun, is the same who lived a hunched, deaf, mute, and blind life, jailed in the womb, fed by the proxy of an umbilical cord. After his stretch for awhile in the warmth of the day, another change, this time to the muted, lashed-in, uncertain ways of the hereafter, a womb scarcely roomier than the first. You spirits are made in one piece. We are more like bugs. Egg, grub, bug: three in one. And us, fetus, man, ghost: three in one. .

SPIRIT 2

Which do you like best to be?

YOUNG CHIEF

Ghost, of course. Our highest estate, the closest to being a spirit we’ll ever get!

(Understanding nod from his hearers.)

In my case though, cut short my love errand, I was not ready! So intent on reaching my goal, that girl, I hardly noticed I was dead. When I found out, I threw a fit! They understood. They compromised. I was given back my form, if not my substance, and my paddler’s form, together with that of my wrecked canoe. I am on leave, so to speak, until I find the girl. Then, and only then, will I be allowed to relax and enjoy my ghostly estate. How happy we both shall be in our nether land of Milu. Hand in hand, walking its fragrant groves, garlanded with maile vines.

(Spirits sigh. Chief boldly rises. Paddler rises timidly. Spirits open their circle ever so little to let them pass.)

I am sorry I disappointed you. Your lookouts were not at fault. Our disguise is more than adequate.

(As the two walk to the stump where the canoe rope is lashed, spirits close their circle tight in the manner of a football huddle. Heated whisperings, curt monkey shrieks, slow sighs.

Paddler unties canoe rope with deliberate lack of haste but with a shaky hand. Chief helps him.)

OLD PADDLER I

(Whisper.)

You laid it on thick, quick-witted binder of spells.

YOUNG CHIEF V

Poor spirits. How famished they look!

(Exit paddler gathering canoe rope. Chief follows, gently waving back towards huddled spirits.)

Aloha!

(Spirits attempt a cordial answer but “Aloha” does not come easily to them. They stutter, but anyhow wave an adieu.)

SPIRIT 4

(Musingly.)

To love.

SPIRIT 3

To be born.

SPIRIT 2

To dream.

HANAAUMOE

Maybe there is more inside men than meat!

(Rising murmur. Weak attempt at action as some dimly realize that perhaps they have been had. Sound of canoe launched and rhythm of waves lapping over sand. Those half-risen squat again.)

SPIRIT 1

I am hungry.

(Suddenly beats a furious tattoo with the stirring spoon against the cooking pot.)