Twenty years ago, Natano Keni was an acting hopeful from Upper Hutt when he headed into town for an audition at Toi Whakaari NZ Drama School. There, Keni faced a panel of eight, but he didn’t recognise one selector who was, like him, Samoan. “Because I was such a young buck, I didn’t notice him in the room,” he says. “Most of them were Pālagi and I was trying to please them. I remember sitting in there for a big group audition. We were presenting our Shakespeare and doing improvisations.
“I was asked to do an improv with a young lady and it went on for a little bit of time and a booming voice came up from the panel, ‘GET TO THE POINT, NATANO.’
“I was like, ‘Who was that?’ It was Nathaniel Lees.”
Yes, Nathaniel Lees, one of our most highly esteemed veterans of stage and screen, as Keni would later discover. Lees, whose chiefly title is Maiava, has many gifts but loudest among them is his distinctive, booming baritone.
Lees is also a pioneer. His 50-year career as a first-generation Pasifika actor-director working in New Zealand required courage and determination. He has become an inspirational template for generations of artists who followed on.
Lees entered an almost completely Pālagi theatre scene where he eventually rejected the whitening make-up and asserted his Pasific Island identity. The only other “brown” actors he can recall working during that time were Māori: George Henare, Rawiri Paratene and Grant McFarland.
Over the years, Lees has been there to try to lift up young Māori and Pacific Island talent. When Oscar Kightley and David Fane created the Pacific Underground theatre group, they asked Lees for help with their first play, Fresh Off the Boat, a milestone work first staged in Christchurch in 1993.
A decade later, he boomed away to his heart’s content as the terrifying minister in the two Sione’s Wedding films, co-written by Kightley. “I had so much fun with that,” he laughs. “The boys said, just be yourself.”
But Lees, 67, is careful who he chooses to support and he is a hard taskmaster. “With social media, everyone wants to be an instant star and that kind of thing gets exposed,” he says. “I get to recognise if it’s a passion or a fad. They have to learn the craft.”
He saw that commitment to craft in Keni. After that first audition at Toi Whakaari, their relationship grew during a first-year class when Lees directed him in a scene from Romeo and Juliet. But at that stage, Keni still didn’t know much about the man who would be his mentor.
Now aged 41, Keni, who grew up in a Samoan-speaking family and still regards English as his second language, recalls thinking, “Who is this guy who has such a good knack for English and story?”
Says Lees: “I was guiding the Pacific Island students who had made it into Toi Whakaari around that time. Most of them would say I was harder on them than I was on the Pālagi students but I expected a lot because they were going to be the leaders going into the future.”
After graduation, Keni moved from acting towards writing and directing, setting up a company called I Ken So Productions with his wife, actor-playwright-producer Sarita So, whose parents lived through the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia before coming to New Zealand. The couple have a 2-year-old son, Beau-Wolf, and when money gets tight, Keni works as “a terrible roofer”.
Together, they have written and staged works influenced by their upbringings: Riverside Kings, in 2017, and Digging To Cambodia, in 2019.
Their new play, which Keni is directing, reunites them with Lees. O le Pepelo, le Gaoi ma le Pala’ai (The Liar, the Thief and the Coward) is a dark comedy about a dying Samoan chief appraising his successors. About 30% of the dialogue is in Samoan.
It had a short season at the Kia Mau Festival in Wellington last year, where Lees was cited as the director’s mentor. One review described it as “beautifully written and directed with crucial details”.
Now, it’s a major production at the Auckland Theatre Company, opening today [March 5] as part of the Auckland Arts Festival. With a cast of nine Samoan actors, Lees is credited more formally this time as “assistant rehearsal director”.
Keni and Lees are both based in Wellington, so there has been a fair amount of travelling north for Keni, his family and his assistant director.
Lees says he is blown away by seeing a production in which the Samoan language is spoken at length. “The first play I directed was Think of a Garden [by John Kneubuhl, at the Watershed Theatre in Auckland in 1993] where there was one character who spoke only Samoan and I was pressured by a lot of people, including my parents, to give some kind of translation or change it so the audience would understand. But they thought the only people who would come and see it would be white.
“I didn’t change it and, I have to say, almost every night, the laughter coming from the Samoan people added to the enjoyment of the Pālagi people in the audience because they felt like they were part of it.
“This play is a joy, an absolute joy. When I talk about it, my mind goes back to when there were no roles I could play, and here we are doing this.”
Keni says that while it is true that theatre in New Zealand has become more diverse, he had to walk away from acting out of necessity.
“There have to be roles you are willing to take. The roles weren’t around that I really wanted to see on stage or screen.
“I don’t call myself a writer or a director but I guess I am in the arts trying to create something which is about bringing people together, trying to create these kinds of roles that my good friend Nathaniel would have been missing when he was starting out.”
O le Pepelo provides a platform “to create these real characters, which I don’t think have ever been seen before”, he adds.
“One of the reasons we are so lucky to have Nathaniel is being with someone who knows the craft of theatre and brings that as my friend, my brother, my mentor. To bring him in for these young guys coming through as well, as actors, they are looking at him and going, ‘Wow.’
“As a Samoan, I see things differently, and Nat does, too. The theme of the play is about how we pass the torch on and who is passing the knowledge on as well. It affects the whole ecology of the community.”
Lees’ experiences have shown him that change may be slow but it does happen, and not just in theatre. “There is a much truer connection to where we are in the Pacific now than there has been in the past. That link back to England and Europe is almost a thing of the past. We realise we are on the other side of the darned world and this is who we are.”
O le Pepelo, le Gaoi ma le Pala’ai (The Liar, the Thief and the Coward), ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, March 5-23.
