I am eight months deep into rumaki reo and staring down the barrel of my last hour-long whakapuaki. Te reo is no longer the source of my headaches, for the first time since I began this journey I don’t have to listen so intently; I can feel it passively wash over me. I hear whispers of a te reo Māori whakaari showing at Basement Theatre carried squarely on the shoulders of fellow Gizzy Girl Te Huamanuka Luiten-Apirana (Ngāti Hikairo, Tainui), star of a one-wahine show.
Ngā Reta; based on Te Huamanuka’s own final whakapuaki at Te Wānanga Takiura is a clean, funny and digestible 50-minute whakaari wherein she is kept on her toes, changing pace just consistently enough for the audience to stay engaged.
Te Huamanuka plays Mia, a 20-something urbanised Māori, far from home. Mia screens her mother’s calls except when she needs money, spending her free time scrolling through Instagram and speaking to te reo with Kim Kardashian via a shoddily calibrated—yet hilarious—AI voice generator. Mia is sent a box of her mother’s old letters from her Nan and ultimately stumbles across a letter that suggests her father is not hers.
Te Huamanuka encompasses a sense of self-awareness, always lovingly poking fun at the characters she is embodying. She has a strong sense of physical comedy, switching it up for each character and walking the fine line between caricature and depth.
While the props and staging are simplistic they are all well utilised, and the lighting and staging allow her to seamlessly move through time and space to her mother’s clubbing era in the nineties, a game show sequence and a Kim Kardashian musical number.
Ngā Reta encounters one obvious pitfall: its accessibility. The work is by—and for—te reo speaking people. But, Te Huamanuka recognises that sometimes we need to sacrifice the accessibility and comfort of others in order to uplift the Māori arts space. It just means that not as many people will be able to enjoy this particular story.
There were times during the play, specifically the dance classes, where I wasn’t quite following what was going on or understanding its importance to the overall story. However, this may have also been a gap in my understanding.
Ngā Reta is a treat; the perfect snack for an easy weeknight in the city. The resolution is clean, surprising and amusing and I found myself laughing through the whole thing.
Featured photo via Basement Theatre.
