The Young & Hungry Tour used to be known as EnsembleImpact, launched 10 years ago by K C Kelly and first reviewed here the following year. The original kaupapa remains: work with Playmarket to select scenes from plays by NZ Playwrights on the NZQA prescribed reading list; develop a comprehensive Study Guide to flesh out the ‘tasters’ the show will offer students; employ a director and four actors to perform them with ‘no-frills’ conventions in simple a traverse space; meanwhile secure and manage bookings nationwide.

While Māori playwrights have invariably been included in each compilation, this year eight are the authors of all the excerpts that make up the I Am Māori programme. Curated to represent stories set in each decade from the 1960s till now, some also reach back to Māori migration then colonisation, and two are set in the near future. 

The credit for dramaturgy is shared by Playmarket and Nancy Brunning, who has also directed the relaxed, friendly and soon-to-prove talented actors who greet us: Piimio Mei, James Forster, Jonathan Morgan and Celeste De Freitas. Having completed their eight week tour, they are now presenting a brief public season at Ta Auaha’s Tapere Iti.

Book-ending the show are the non-verbal Prologue and Epilogue from And What Remains by Miria George. It premiered in 2006, is set in 2010, and foreshadows the possibility of ethnic cleansing in New Zealand. As people walk with suitcases, suggesting an impending journey for each, it becomes apparent one, played by Piimio, is suspected, unwelcome, ‘other’ … There are silent screams – and she liberates herself with a joyous dance I take as recalling what she is having to leave before it (the dance) morphs into fighting off an oppressor.

In the multi award-winning but as yet unproduced Tan-Knee (2007) by Maraea Rakuraku, two tane in a boxing gym – the instructor Tū (Jonathan) and his reluctant trainee Pōtiki (James) – come to verbal blows over what gives them and their hapu strength, self-esteem, identity, mana. Is it boxing, favoured by Tū, whose role model is Muhammad Ali, or Pōtiki’s aligning with the ‘TamaItis’, the Te Urewera Prophets, up in the bush. Eunice (Celeste) observes and makes non-committal comments.

The strong dramatic tension builds to an impassioned speech by Pōtiki, declaring the answer to their liberation from feeling ‘not good enough’ lies not in following fighters from other cultures but in looking to their tīpuna, who navigated the Pacific ocean numerous times to establish their people in this land; their Taneatua – which is the actual name of this place people have bastardised by calling it Tan-Knee.

(Taneatua, meaning ‘ancestor with continuing influence’, is a small town between coastal Whakatane and inland Ruatoki, in the Urewera Valley – which Kiwis became aware of through the infamous ‘Anti-Terror Raids’ of 2007. Tū is the god of war and tū means to fight; pōtiki means youngest child. Tan-Knee is the first in a planned trilogy of plays and, based on this tantalising taste, I can’t wait to see it, let alone all three.)

160 year-old Tiri, in Witi Ihimaera’s Woman Far Walking (2000), is the embodiment of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, born on 6 February 1840. Piimio compellingly inhabits the role, abetted by Celeste as her conscience, Tilly. Described on the Playmarket website as a play “about history, how nations are made and how the human condition survives” Woman Far Walking is a millennium ‘state-of-the-nation’ stock-take from a Māori perspective that every generation of New Zealanders should see.

The scene from Rore Hapipi’s Death of the Land (1976) is set in the Land Court presided over by a somnambulant Pākehā Judge (Celeste). The applicant, Rongo (Jonathan) challenges the Māori Clerk (James) about putting on a suit and playing the white man’s game, and gets as good as he gives – leaving us in the audience to make our own judgements. Another excellent starting point for discussion and follow-up study. (If you are Googling, Rore Hapipi has also worked and published as Rowley Habib.)

Briar Grace-Smith’s first play, Ngā Pou Wahine (1995) finds Kura (Celeste) offsetting the boredom of working on a tinned food production line by fantasising she’s an Uma Thurman-esque movie character going on a romantic dinner date with a Peace Corps truck driver in Bosnia. I have to confess that only after checking the script do I realise I have misinterpreted mimed action involving defect cans, that evolves into battling demons with a laser gun, as playing poker machines. No wonder I don’t quite get what’s happening.

Clothes are laid out on the floor to represent a body for the scene from Hui (2013) by Mitch Tawhi Thomas. Draped in a wrap and sprawled beside him, in mourning, is Tina (Jonathan), returned from London: the transgender sibling of born-again Christian Pita (James). Here the abiding question of cultural identity and being authentic to oneself is played out according to gender: a powerful scene, thanks to each actor fully representing their character’s point of view. Family emerges as the immutable constant in an ever-changing world.

The scene chosen from Albert Belz’s latest play, Astroman (set in 1983), is the parent-teacher meeting between Michelle Te Rehua (Piimio) and Mrs Mahara (Celeste), the teacher of Michelle’s son Hemi/Jimmy. The boy has clearly got into trouble at his previous school – but it turns out that it’s his highly creative essay about his father that Mrs Mahara wants to discuss. She delights in Hemi’s fantasy about his dad becoming the first Māori to land on the moon. The idea that her boy might be a genius is new to Michelle – and we, too, have to consider the evidence.  

Another play by Miria George that is set ‘sometime in the future’ is The Night Mechanics, where the major issue is the commercial appropriation of water. We tap into the scene where two sisters, Hine (Piimio) and Zelda (Celeste), have kidnapped Father Teal (Jonathan), the clergyman adviser to the Water Company that has acquired exclusive rights. Now they have to decide what to do next. References to families sleeping in cars, the life-giving and destructive properties of water, and how losing ownership of it has destroyed the hapu, are all highly recognisable.

Eighteen year-old Rongo’s monologue from Act One of Hone Kouka’s classic Waiora, exquisitely performed by Piimio, has her speaking to Nanny’s spirit in the shallows of a south island beach. Far away from her tūrangawaewae, Waiora te Ūkaipō, The Homeland, she is standing in the water so she can touch home. It’s the loss of te reo that distresses her, and the fact that “We are stopping ourselves from speaking the reo. No one is doing it to us. Dad said if we live like the Pākehā then they will leave us in peace and we will be strong.” She knows that this will make their people lost.

Yet the reo she speaks – e.g. “Auē e Nanny, whakarongo mai ki ahau. Kei te whakarongo mai koe? Auē taukiri e. Tukua ahau kia hāere ki to taha.” – is eloquent even to Pākehā like me with only an extremely rudimentary knowledge of it. She wants to be heard by her nanny; she wants to go with her. And those who have seen the whole play know that that is how it plays out.

The epilogue, from And What Remains, is written for the central character, Mary, but here all four actors open their suitcase, caress the whenua (earth) inside it and stand barefoot in it. A specific image about what the tangata whenua have lost, it also stands as a warning about the planet Earth to which all humanity may be lost if we don’t get our acts together.

May the The Young & Hungry Tour (nee EnsembleImpact) initiative live long and prosper. It is a taonga, hei kākano puipuiaki (a precious seed) in so many ways. Just one abiding value has been that it proves to high school and university students that life in Aotearoa NZ is an endlessly rich resource for exploring and expressing human experience, and that theatre is a great way to do it. 

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