ABSTRACT
The work of the American Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl (1920–1992) perfectly illustrates the fluid nature of Oceanian modernism, bringing together regional and international currents into a distinctly Pacific blend. After studying under Thornton Wilder and Elmer Rice at Yale University, Kneubuhl wrote a number of ground-breaking stage plays, including The Harp in the Willows (1946) and This City Is Haunted (1947), as well as the biopic Damien (1950)—the first feature film produced by a Polynesian. During the 1950s and 1960s, Kneubuhl worked in Los Angeles as a freelance writer for programmes, but on his return to Samoa in 1968, he devoted himself to stagecraft with the major plays, Mele Kanikau: A Pageant (1975), A Play: A Play (1990), and Think of a Garden (1992).
Christopher Balme identifies Kneubuhl as ‘the spiritual father of Pacific island theatre’, but while the dramatist’s plays continue to attract critical engagement, his teleplays have been largely dismissed. Challenging this view, this chapter analyses ‘The Perils of Penrose’ (1961), an episode that Kneubuhl contributed to the television series James A. Michener’s Adventures in Paradise (1959–1962). It illuminates ‘The Perils of Penrose’ in terms of its modern and modernist pretexts, specifically the ‘diving-dress god’ stories that were popular throughout the first half of the twentieth century. From H. G. Wells’s ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’ (1898) and John Russell’s ‘The Lost God’ (1921) to George Abbott’s film The Sea God (1930) and Les Crutchfield’s radio adaptation of the Wells story, these tales indicate the colonial fascination with ‘cargo cults’, millenarian religious movements that incorporate mimetic representations of Western technology in a ritual effort to acquire wealth (‘cargo’). Whether in terms of Wells’s proto-modernist irony, Russell’s and Abbott’s neoromanticism, or Crutchfield’s colonial gothic, diving-dress god stories cast Melanesian cargoists as a foil for the self-aware and self-determining European protagonist. ‘The Perils of Penrose’ turns this trope against itself, revealing the modern European adventurer to be himself a cultic ‘big man’ obsessed with the cargo that might be looted from Pacific cultures. As this chapter shows, Kneubuhl thereby enacts a self-reflexive, postcolonial intervention into the diving-dress god story, bringing his teleplay far closer to his more obviously experimental drama than has been recognised.
