Donna Blanchard’s journey to a theater in Downtown Honolulu started while reading a book on vacation about 16 years ago. It was about ʻtheater of place’ and focused on the real life stories that exist simultaneously in one community.
Today, she is the managing director of Kumu Kahua Theatre, which is located in Downtown Honolulu and produces plays by and about the people of Hawaiʻi. Blanchard grew up in Northwest Indiana and had never been to Hawaiʻi when she took the job.
“I'm passionate because I feel like I found my life's mission,” Blanchard said. “And you can’t stop doing that. A lot of people never find it.”
Blanchard spoke with Aloha State Daily via Zoom from her home office, which includes a backdrop of glittering purses and shoes. She shared her career journey, as well as what inspires her creativity and plans for the theater in 2025.
What inspires you? I always have had a deep-seated need to communicate. I have my bachelor's degree in acting and also had a business career, because it's tough out there. Eventually, a theater that I was on the board of asked me to help run the place because I could sit in board meetings and say: ‘Oh no, that's not how you run a business. We’ve got to think like business people.’ And when I started working for that theater, I needed to stay off the stage for a while just to get my head around the day job portion of it. Also, it's hard to be in the same building seven days a week, if you're involved in a show. During that time, I started painting. Art leaked out of me in other ways. … I think that entertainment is very important and expression — all on its own. But for me, I wanted something more. I read a book on vacation one time by a woman named Jo Carson who would go into different towns and gather stories — have conversations with people — and create shows, scripts based on those stories, and present them with community theaters. … I don't think Jo ever called it this, but I called it the “theater of place,” and I wanted to be a part of something like that.
You eventually met Jo Carson and became friends. Can you tell us about your last visit with her? She was in Tennessee, and I was in Northwest Indiana still, and on my drive home, I spoke aloud: ʻI want to be a part of a theater that just produces ʻtheater of place’ work, but I don't want to have to travel around like Jo did because Jo went from town to town.’ … I looked for a theater like that, and I ended up coming up with HTY [Honolulu Theatre for Youth which] was looking for a new managing director at the time. They had a very long interview process. I think I was talking to them for six months, and I got to be friends with one of their board members through the process. HTY ended up hiring a woman named Becky Dunning. She's wonderful. … The board member asked me: ‘If something else comes up for a theater like what you're looking for, can I call you?’ And I said: ʻOf course!’ She already had Kumu Kahua in mind. They had been looking for a managing director for a long time. They had gone through financial duress, much like what the previous theater I had worked with went through. We were a perfect match for each other. I had never been here before I moved here. We Skyped. They didn't have any money to bring me out. I felt like I literally told the universe what I wanted, and it handed it to me. How could I say no to that?
What were you most proud of in 2024? Toward the end of 2024, we produced a trilogy of shows, the entire trilogy. The initial piece of the trilogy, number one, we premiered almost 30 years ago. Our artistic director worked very closely with the playwright, who's Hawaiian and it's a very deeply personal and intense family story of a Hawaiian family that loses their homeland in Waikīkī, and the generational trauma that accompanies that. As soon as the second installment was ready, we produced it and shared it as broadly as possible, and the same with the third. Last year was the first year the entire trilogy has ever been produced as one package, and it was a real feat for us.
Tell us more about “Kāmau: The Trilogy” by Alani Apio and how the theater brought this trio of shows to life. We're talking about three different casts. There was only one actor that overlapped in all three casts. … Our shows normally run for five weeks,Thursday through Sunday. For the trilogy, we had the first installment every Thursday, second on Friday, the third one on Saturday and every Sunday — for five weeks in a row — we did all three shows. We had a lot of audience buy those tickets to spend the day with us, so we had to have food in between the [shows] and tried to figure out the best timing for all of the shows — and marketing of such a crazy endeavor. We performed all three shows at the Festival of Pacific [Arts & Culture]. … Then, after we closed, we took the third installment to Maui. That's the only one we had not yet taken to the Maui Arts & Cultural Center. It was a real marathon. Kamehameha Publishing also published and released the trilogy at the same time.
Can you talk about what this series meant for the theater? The shortened version of our mission is that we produce shows by and about the people of Hawaii. A lot of our shows are comedies; they're light hearted. It's more difficult to do the shows that are really good conversation fodder but they're also sometimes really upsetting. We tackle really difficult subjects, in a way that I believe only theater can.
What can you tell us about what’s coming up for the theater in 2025? Over the course of centuries, most plays have been written by men. Most plays continue to be written by men. If you look at who's writing the plays that are produced on this island — and in the state and the country — at least 95% of them are men, and the male roles are always the juiciest. It's rare that you have shows that really have good female roles, or if they do, they'll have one good female role to five good male roles. We have a season coming up. We're not ready to announce it, but it includes both majority female playwrights and really great roles for female actors.
To learn more about the upcoming season of shows, go to Kumu Kahua Theatre's website.
