You’re reading The Husk's Saturday edition, our Weekender, a countdown/roundup of miscellanea from Micronesia, Guam, and Earth. surprise, it’s an essay!¹

Shared laughs, shared tears, a shared sense of understanding.

Audience members who filed out of the University of Guam Theater before the question-and-answer session after the Oct. 7 showing of “Masters of the Currents” passed up on a once-in-a-lifetime encounter. 

The years we’ve spent self-quarantined, tucked indoors, left to stew in the jungles of our thoughts have marked us in many ways. Some effects we still don’t know. We’ve since reopened many parts of the world but we do not reenter society at large unscathed. We carry the past two years with us, in the masks stored in our glove compartments. In the sanitizer bottles stacked on surfaces. In the digital thermometers standing guard inside businesses, searching for the presence of the enemy, ready to herald its arrival. A Paul Revere for the 2020s. 

To return to in-person events, then, will always feel different. How can it be the same as it was before the pandemic, when we ourselves are different?

Most fortunately, the “Masters of the Currents” performance was an in-person event. ²

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A post shared by Breaking Wave Theatre Company (@bwtcguam)

Last year when I learned about the play, which is the first nationally touring play about Micronesians in the United States, I wished it could’ve been broadcast or streamed in its entirety online. I wouldn’t be able to watch it otherwise, I thought. But I was (thankfully) wrong.

What the internet has in global reach, it lacks in real-life ambiance. Live theater is very much a shared experience. There is no intangible partition, no digital buffer between the performers and the audience. It happens all at once for everyone in the room. No commercial breaks. No button to pause. 

The energy on Oct. 7 was high. I settled into my seat at the University of Guam Theatre and emotion welled up inside me. My chest packed with feelings, equal parts gratitude (to be able to do something I did not think I would have ever been able to do), excitement (to see Micronesians thriving in a space like I had not witnessed before), and, already, sorrow (because it would be over before I knew it and I most likely would not be able to watch it again). The play had not even started. I should’ve picked a seat in the corner to cry without disturbing fellow audience members.

Around me, the room buzzed with activity. People finding their seats, finding their friends and, because on Guam everyone pretty much knows everyone, exchanging pleasantries across aisles. 

The house lights dimmed and the buzz receded. Nedine Songeni, of Humanities Guåhan, greeted us. Master Navigator Larry Raigetal blessed us with a chant, leaving the applause on the stage.

Enter Innocenta Sound-Kikku, who plays Tinana, and Ova Saopeng, who plays Tamana. 

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A post shared by Breaking Wave Theatre Company (@bwtcguam)

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A post shared by Breaking Wave Theatre Company (@bwtcguam)

Dressed in the Micronesian uncle weekend uniform of shorts, a polo shirt and a towel around his neck, Saopeng delivers the line, “There is nothing micro about Micronesia.”

He lets the word Micronesia fill the stage, it reverberates in my chest. And away we go. 

“Masters of the Currents” incorporates real-life experiences of Micronesians who moved to Hawai’i. Through characters Tinana, Tamana, Soso (Jayceleen Ifenuk), Eva (Emeraldrose Philbrick) and Alanso (Gideon Mana Lorete), audiences learn about the discrimination Micronesians face in school, among their friends and teachers. From microaggressions to violence, viewers get as close to a first-person perspective as possible. “Masters” invites viewers into the homes of Micronesians, the labyrinth of family systems and the social structures passed down from generations. 

Why do Micronesians wear those ornate skirts? Why don’t Micronesians maintain eye contact? How are those Micronesians related? 

There’s more, of course. 

Viewers also are transported to Micronesia, her glassy waters and lush jungles. 

Wherever we go, we cannot forget that this is where we are from. 

I cannot retell each act of the play. For one, at certain points, I was in actual tears and so my vision was blurred and my hearing blocked by my thoughts urging me to compose myself. But also, I don’t want to rob you of the in-person experience.

If you can, get a ticket to see it. And stay for the Q & A. 

After the standing ovation, a majority of the audience had filtered out of the theater. Sound-Kikku, Saopeng, Ifenuk, Philbrick, Lorete and Director Leilani Chan lined up on stage, alongside James Aevermann, from the Breaking Wave Theatre Company who facilitated the session.

A couple of audience members used the time to share their appreciation for the play. They were not from the islands and the play was a valuable learning experience. They wanted the play to be shown in the public schools. (Here, here!) 

Before time was up, the microphone was passed to an audience member who asked if the skirts the cast wore for the production were passed on to them in the same way Pohnpeians share skirts with family. She paused before finishing her question to collect herself.

It had been a long week, she explained, apologizing and trying to stifle her tears. The energy in the room shifted. Anyone paying attention filled with empathy. We’ve been there. We’ve all had long weeks, unrelenting weeks, weeks punctuated by loss and grief and frustration. Weeks that bring us to tears, involuntarily. Thankfully, she waas here with us, sharing this moment with this incredible cast that just minutes ago had taken us across space and time. They’d transported us to Hawai’i and the Marshall Islands. We had an hour with this cast. They made us contemplate, and worry, and laugh, and escape. (Another gift of live theater.)

“I share your tears,” Sound-Kikku said to the audience member. The answer to her question was, “Yes.” The skirts, the skaato, the urohs that the cast wore on stage carried the same cultural significance as the skaato and urohs possessed by many Micronesian women. They are not just props. They are integral parts of the culture. 

Beside her, Andresina Sengebau McManus, a pastor and principal of Career Tech High Academy Charter School, stood up and shared that she’d brought some of her students to the play. They, too, were wearing their skaato.  The students rose to show off their skirts and the audience applauded.

McManus, who is Palauan, said she wished she had something like “Masters” growing up. 

Her voice wavered.

Again, there was a shift of energy in the room. This time, it seemed the gaps between the people in that room closed. We had come into this theater as separate entities in a singular space. Much like individual islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean, each audience member was their own little island. 

Quietly, people in their seats, along with people on stage, wiped tears away. We, too, wished there was something like this for us growing up. How would our perspective of ourselves have changed to see people like us in spaces like this? How would the perspective of our peers, our teachers, the adults in our lives have changed if they had only seen something like this?

In that moment, life zoomed out. We weren’t each our own island anymore. Tectonic plates shifted. We coalesced into all the islands and the entire Pacific Ocean all at once, suspended in time.

As a line in “Masters” so aptly put it, we all felt then that we were all in the same boat.

It was an event, that session. We will not get that space and time again but it is almost enough that we had it at all. McManus’s was the last question of the night.

Seeing as “Masters” had successfully unraveled us, Saopeng thoughtfully put us back together. He led us in taking three deep breaths. And away we went.

It is appropriate, I think, to send you, dear reader, off with the sounds that concluded the “Masters of the Currents” performance.