Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
JANET Jackson equated happiness with control: "Make your life a little easier/When you get the chance just take control." R. Kelly wrote that when it comes to finding the love of a lifetime "Age ain't nothing but a number." Hard-won Wisdom
shared on stageBy John Berger
Special to the Star-BulletinJeannette Paulson Hereniko proves them right in "Wild Wisdom," her solo autobiographical show at Hawaii Pacific University.
Paulson Hereniko found only misery as long as she let others define her and her abilities. She premiered her saga as a two-night event at Kumu Kahua last year with input from director Joyce Maltby, a 14-time Po'okela Award winner and HPU's director of theater.
In content and execution, "Wild Wisdom" is roughly equal parts modern drama and therapy group talkathon as Paulson Hereniko recounts experiences that defined the first 40 years of her life and made her feel unworthy of love.
"Wild Wisdom": Starring Jeanette Paulson Hereniko, repeats 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at Hawaii Pacific University Theatre, 45-045 Kamehameha Highway. Tickets $10 general, $5 students. Call 254-0853
It will be of greatest interest to those who knew her in the "bad old days," but didn't know what she was going through. Acting students will be interested in how changes in voice, facial expression and posture create the characters of her psychologically abusive mother, pampered younger sister, stolid first husband, and others.
Hereniko Paulson describes growing up with a disinterested father and a mother who missed no opportunity to shred her self-esteem. When young Jeannette discovers that she has what it takes to catch a boy, she rushes into marriage only to discover that her husband expects her to be a self-effacing stay-at-home wife.
Everything she does to express her creativity -- writing a newspaper column, organizing a Wednesday "Sunday school" at church, creating a storytelling festival -- meets with his disapproval. It's a heartbreaking story.
The pattern continues in Hawaii. She gets a college degree that qualifies her to do grunt work at the East-West Center and suggests the EWC organize a film festival. She's told it'll never work and women shouldn't concern themselves with such things.
She single-handedly organizes the successful Hawai'i International Film Festival and when she is eventually forced to choose between her marriage and her new career as HIFF's founding director, she chooses her career.
Free at last! Then she learns that her sister has early onset Alzheimer's disease and there's a 50 percent chance that she'll get it too. She resigns from HIFF with plans to travel the world. That's when a handsome younger man comes calling.
Paulson Hereniko and her director/mentor Maltby work a few light moments into the two-hour odyssey, but this is primarily a straight autobiographical narrative of a hard-knock life.
The sharing of personal experiences brings to mind the tightly produced work of local playwrights Jan Itamura and Margaret Jones, who shared details of their menstrual experiences in their outstanding 1993 two-woman show, "A Period Piece."
What "Wild Wisdom" doesn't have, because of Paulson Hereniko's high community profile, is suspense. For all young Jeannette's giddiness about her marriage, we know it isn't going to last. We know her film festival will be a success. And we know that despite her dithering about dating a younger man she will accept his invitation.
A passage in which she touts Christian Gaines as her worthy successor at the HIFF strikes a bizarre note with our knowledge of his controversial ouster.
Paulson Hereniko spends much of Act II describing how she came to terms with the harm caused by her abusive mother, apparently by concluding that Mom had been doing the best she could as a woman who was the daughter of immigrants and who had grown up during the Great Depression. Who can question Paulson Hereniko's conclusion if it works for her?
Click for online
calendars and events.
