1. For a discussion of other theatrical representations of the Pacific resulting from US military and political involvement in the region in the early twentieth century, see Margaret Werry, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth: Spectacular Politics, Political Spectacle, and the American Pacific’, Theatre Journal 58:3 (2005), 4–35.
2. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency’, in his The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
3. Despite the play’s popularity, there is very little literature on it. An early discussion of the play and its fortunes can be found in a now out-of-print account of Hawaii and the Pacific, Anatomy of Paradise, by the social historian and novelist J. C. Furnas, first published in 1937 and revised in 1948: Anatomy of Paradise:Hawai’i and the Islands of the South Seas, rev. edn (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948). Jane C. Desmond provides a brief analysis in her study of hula, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 65–6. For a more detailed discussion, see my article ‘Selling the Bird: Richard Walton Tully’s The Bird of Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical Commodification’, Theatre Journal, 57:1 (2005), 1–20.
4. Richard Walton Tully, ‘A Bird of Paradise: An American play in three acts’, no place (1911). All quotations are from the typescript held in the Library of Congress, page references are given in parenthesis in the text. This appears to be the only extant copy. The indefinitive article of the title was later changed to ‘The Bird of Paradise’.
5. Anon., ‘Bird of Paradise has Scenic Beauty’, The New York Times, 9 January 1912, VIII. 4.