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My Name is Gary Cooper by Victor Rodger (review)

Since its premiere at New Zealand’s Auckland Theatre Company in 2007, My Name is Gary Cooper, by New Zealand–born Samoan playwright Victor Rodger, has been acclaimed for its witty, poignant, and provocative redressing of the celluloid stereotypes of the South Pacific. Cutting cinematically between Sāmoa during the 1950s–70s, Los Angeles in 1973, and Auckland in 2000, Rodger’s postcolonial revenge tragedy tells the story of a young Samoan man, Gary Cooper—named after the movie star— who journeys to the United States to enact retribution on his father, Nick White, a stills photographer who seduced Gary’s mother while on location for the 1953 Cooper film Return to Paradise and abandoned her to a life of prostitution and eventual suicide. The play’s action and aesthetic turn on a co-optation and subversion of the film industry’s fetishizing gaze, skillfully juxtaposing live bodies with the visual mechanics of film and photography to puncture clichéd assumptions about Polynesians, while deploying those selfsame scopophilic fantasies to plot the White family’s demise. An equally important aspect of the play, however, is its sophisticated engagement with discourses of transpacific travel through its layered references to the commercial, diasporic, ethnographic, and personal journeys that have helped produce the modern Pacific. This feature resonated strongly in Kumu Kahua Theatre’s production in Honolulu.