- PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents No. 2, Jan. 31 - Feb. 4 8 p.m. at The Cultch (1895 Venables St., Vancouver). Post-show talkback Feb. 1, led by Joyce Rosario. For more details visit pushfestival.ca.
IN that delicate twilight between darkness and dawn, a Fijian matriarch awakens, senses the imminence of her death, and orders her grandson to prepare a spectacular family feast at which she will name her successor.
That transition of familial power and the cooking, squabbling, fighting, and dancing that ensues is the basis for No. 2, a New Zealand play scheduled to make its Vancouver debut at The Cultch on Jan. 31 as part of the PuSh Festival Aboriginal Performance Series.
The play examines the rivalries, jealousies, and love of nine characters, each of them portrayed by No. 2's original star, Madeleine Sami.
"It's just a story about a family. They're slightly dysfunctional like I think most families are," Sami says. "I think that's what I relate to and I think that's what most audiences relate to as well."
The play has been performed on four continents and adapted into a movie, but it began as a fistful of pages written by a movie theatre employee.
Sami, 31, was fresh out of high school when she met Toa Fraser, a 24-year-old aspiring writer who is now a playwright and filmmaker.
"When we came together to make No. 2, it was about five pages of dialogue and we had three weeks to. . . come up with something," Sami says of the play's 1999 debut.
While rehearsing, Sami and Fraser fell into discussions about their own families, and the play took shape.
"It's a mixture of his upbringing and bits of my upbringing as well," Sami says.
Sami recalls Fraser rapidly turning the five pages into a 90-minute play just a few days before No. 2 was unveiled in front of an Auckland, New Zealand audience.
"I was taping my lines onto my Walkman and listening to them when I went to bed, hoping that they would go into my head," Sami says, laughing at the memory of the long-ago day she owned a Walkman.
Playing multiple roles has become a calling card for Sami, who also plays five characters on the New Zealand comedy TV show Super City. Part of the reason for her versatility may come from her diverse background.
"I did Irish dancing and ate fish curry a lot," she says, cheerfully explaining her Irish-Fijian-Maori-Kiwi heritage and its impact on her childhood.
Sami grew up in South Auckland amid a mixture of several Polynesian and Maori cultures, an environment she credits for her artistic tendencies.
"It was just a real melting pot," Sami says. "Which is I think probably what made me an actor in the end, having all these characters and cultures around me."
But while her environment helped cultivate her talent, Sami says she always wanted to perform.
"I think I've always been an actor. I was always the family entertainment at family parties."
Besides belting out tunes from The Sound of Music and Grease for friends and relatives, Sami says she was known for her commitment to comedy.
"I met an old family friend a couple years ago and she was like, 'Ah, you were so funny when you were young, you'd. . . run into a wall for my amusement,'" Sami recalls. "I just loved the feeling of getting a laugh."
Uncomfortable with the theatre, Sami imagined being in movies as a child.
"The theatre still has a little bit of an elite kind of vibe to it, and I didn't grow up very wealthy," Sami says.
Still, while Mad Max piloted his Interceptor through a post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland and Hollywood actors descended on New Zealand's larger neighbour during the heyday of Ozploitation cinema in the 1980s, most Kiwis had a different focus, according to Sami.
"We're a very tiny nation of people who are quite fixated on the sport of rugby and that's about it. That's the thing we cling to, because we are really great at it," Sami explains. "Most people just want to watch rugby and talk about rugby and play rugby. So the arts and music, it's always been a bit of a struggle for finding its feet."
Now known for odd comedies like Flight of the Conchords, coming-of-age stories like Whale Rider, and bringing Middle Earth to the world with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, New Zealand was enjoying a heyday of its own when Sami decided to take a year off after finishing high school.
"I said, 'I'll give acting a go,' and I've been acting ever since," she says.
Sami has appeared in plays, films, and the last season of the sword and sorcery TV series Xena: Warrior Princess, which was taped in New Zealand.
After years of trying to get on the show, Sami was finally cast as an Amazon on what she called "the Saving Private Ryan episode."
"I'm pretty proud to be part of the goriest episode of Xena's history," Sami says. "Most everyone just ends up getting slaughtered. I think my character survived, so I was pretty stoked."
Speaking about No. 2 from a hotel room in Edmonton, Alberta on the eve of her Canadian stage debut, Sami is quick to laugh about the familiar task in front of her.
Asked how she goes about playing nine characters in one play, she laughs and replies: "I don't know, man."
Still, Sami says she believes in the power of the play.
"The show is set on one really hot summer's day in New Zealand, and it's minus 25 at the moment, so I'm really hoping I can transport people to that warm, sunny day in New Zealand from the freezing cold weather out here."
Sami has been something of an ambassador for No. 2, taking the play to Scotland in 2000 and discovering the story's universal appeal.
"When I was in Edinburgh and I had just finished the show. . . this blonde, tanned Swedish woman was crying. and she came up to me and was like, 'I just want to hug you because that was my nana out there on the stage,'" Sami recounts.
"And I'm thinking, 'this is crazy that this very Swedishsounding, Swedish-looking, Swedish girl really connected to this Fijian nana on stage.'"
While Sami doesn't rule out walking away from a slowmotion explosion in a Hollywood blockbuster or getting scouted "for some amazing Canadian film," she says her goal is to work in projects that reflect her homeland.
"I'd rather make a movie about New Zealand and take that to the world than put on an American accent," she says. "I think it's really important to tell stories from where you come from. . . there's some really great value in taking a story that's really Kiwi and having people love that all around the world."
