Just a normal girl with normal girl issues
Early this year I was looking for an actress to play Shalimar Seiuli — the young American Samoan fa’afafine who was infamously pulled over in a car with Eddie Murphy early one morning in Los Angeles, in 1997.
A year later she was dead — and it was this that led me to write a play called Girl on a Corner, where Shalimar got to tell her version of events.
I knew the actress playing Shalimar had to be transgender. I knew she had to be good enough to carry an entire play on her shoulders. And I knew she had to have the guts to swear like a trooper in Samoan and yet be vulnerable enough to let the audience share Shalimar’s joy — and, more importantly, her pain.
In the end, I picked Amanaki Prescott-Faletau, a Tongan graduate of the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts (PIPA) in Auckland. She is what Tongans call fakaleiti or fakafefine, and Samoans fa’afafine. Meaning, like a lady — like a woman.
Casting her was a leap of faith. Nothing I had seen her do before this indicated that she could hit all the notes that Shalimar had to hit.
The result? Metro magazine called her “utterly charismatic.” The transgender reviewer, Lexie Matheson, praised her “simply outstanding … towering performance” on GayNZ.com. And in the 2015 Auckland Fringe Festival awards, Amanaki took out the gong for Best Performance.
She may not yet be at the same level as Orange is the New Black’s Laverne Cox, who made history as the first transgender cover girl on Time magazine last year. But it’s clear that the 26-year-old is on her way.
This year, aside from her award-winning turn in Girl on a Corner, she wowed audiences in Freak Show, an acclaimed dance piece by Fine Fatale. She was part of the PIPA posse who welcomed the All Blacks to Samoa for their historic match. And she acted opposite Robbie Magasiva in another play of mine, Club Paradiso, where she played a young fakaleiti subjected to the sadistic whims of Magasiva’s P-fuelled character.
Last month, she won an award (Best Play for the Young) from Playmarket, the national playwriting agency for Inky Pinky Ponky, which she co-wrote with a fellow PIPA graduate, Leki Jackson-Bourke, and which was produced this year by the Auckland Theatre Company.
Amanaki is one of a number of exciting and gifted young Pacific and Maori artists who I see as the future of New Zealand theatre. Last week, I sat down with her and asked her about her background and her life, which hasn’t always been so rosy.
Read interview with Amanaki here
Amanaki shares her story through the Taolunga