“A Clown’s Nightmare of a Masquerade Ball”

Abstract

Abstract This Presidential Address from the 2019 PAMLA Conference treats The Moon and I (1942), a newly recognized play by Samoan-American dramatist John Kneubuhl (1920-1992). With recourse to contexts developed through Kneubuhl’s other stage and screen dramas, Orr will discuss the playwright’s experiments with the fale aitu (a dramatic Samoan clowning genre) as well as Modernist and postcolonial literary traditions. By turns tragic and comic, Naturalist and Symbolist, Polynesian and Western, The Moon and I emerges as an important work within Kneubuhl’s groundbreaking Oceanic Modernism ouevre.