Flesh Maze was always going to be a hard act to follow, even without the MC’s ill-judged intro. “From break-dancing to theatre,” he intones. “We’ve now got a theatre group from South Auckland.

“You guys like theatre?”

“Nah… sucks,” says a boy in Michael Jordan’s outsized singlet, one of 200 capped cubs hanging out at Pasifika’s Children’s Stage on a languid late-summer Saturday. And this seems to be the consensus: desultory applause greets the six colossi — the Black Friars — as they clomp on to stage. “Boring,” says another boy before they’ve even said a word.

“People think it’s all ‘thees’ and ‘thous’,” Black Friar Lauie Sila had told me earlier. But inside 60 seconds — in the time it takes the immense Samoan Sila to strum through the Pointer Sisters’ Fire (“I’m ridin’ in your car… do do do do… You turn on the radio…”) — he’s got these kids in his pocket. When he breaks mid-chorus to cheer his beloved Queensland, at war on an imaginary telly in the distance, a hundred little heads swivel around, fully thinking they’ll see some State of Origin.

Now Sila’s joined on stage by the other Friars — third-formers fretfully counting their underarm hairs. The old bloke standing beside me in ‘The Fobfather’ T-shirt (“fob” meaning “fresh off the boat”) is chortling like a Samoan Santa — that is until Uini Atonio’s star turn as a crypto-fascist cultural leader, mangling the name of his hapless palagi recruit: the Fobfather’s doubles over and is now seemingly in some distress. It’s probably just as well that the performance — the first act of Being Brown, the pointed Michelle Johansson-penned play about growing up Pasifikan in South Auckland — lasts just 15 minutes.

But that’s time enough to know you’ve seen something special, to see why Pasifika’s entertainment manager Rick Tuiasau was so enthralled (“They amazed us all at their audition… their mixture of drama and dance was very, very good — and different to anything we’d seen before”). And time, too, to see why the Black Friars are performing two shows at Auckland’s Herald Theatre at the upcoming International Comedy Festival — Being Brown and the hilarious fairytale mash-up Goldilocks and the Three Little Puaka. Hell, even the mini-me Michael Jordan’s impressed: “Those Black Fullas... they were awesome, eh?”

“People think theatre is all thees and thous,” Black Friar Lauie Sila had said [before going on stage at Pasifika]. But inside 60 seconds, he’s got the kids in the audience in his pocket…

A month out from their Herald opening, Michelle Johansson sits in a darkened classroom, firing off a fusillade of texts. Head of English and Drama at Wesley College, Johansson, 29, is co-ordinating the collection of the Friars, mostly carless Wesley old students living out in “Mangry” (Mangere), for tonight’s rehearsal at the college. Uini Atonio, a 1.9m, 153kg 16-year-old has been dispatched to fetch the similar-sized Sila in a friend’s car: with two more 100kg-plus Friars in the back, the little Subaru Impreza hatch will be riding low through the Karaka hills.

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt,” grins Atonio when he gets back to Paerata. The only current Wesley student in the Friars’ core group of six, Atonio knows the drill: you’re not allowed to enter, or leave, Johansson’s classroom without the password — a Shakespearean quotation that changes weekly.

With a 330-strong roll that’s 98 percent Polynesian, decile one Wesley is famed for its rugby prowess — this is Jonah’s alma mater — but under the stick of Shakespeare-obsessive Johansson (who knows Othello and Romeo and Juliet by heart), the school’s been throwing its weight around on stage. In 2005 and 2006 it won the South Auckland regional final of the Sheilah Winn Festival of Shakespeare in schools; in 2005 Sila and Billy Revell were selected in the New Zealand Young Shakespeare Company that then went off to the Bard’s old stamping ground in London.

Talk to Revell, a pale, softly-spoken 19-year-old with piercing blue eyes, and you appreciate what an experience this must have been. Here was a Niuean- Samoan-European lad from Grey Lynn who’d suffered stage-fright so crippling he’d been rendered mute during a fourth-form play and refused to act for the next year and a half. Now he found himself treading the boards at the Globe as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra. When he returned home, Revell chucked in his communications degree at AUT: “Acting. I felt it was my calling after being at the Globe – that’s what I wanted to do.”

Still, he admits he had doubts that would only be assuaged over several talks with Johansson. “It’s not often you get people [like Johansson] with Masters degrees who’ve experienced life in South Auckland, or at a school like Wesley.

“She’s a real driving force. Not just for me but for all the guys. She’s the person who grounds us. She organises everything. She’s our producer, our writer, our director. She’s kind of like the mum.”

Johansson catches his last comment and launches a lavalava at his head.

“A mum figure? Let’s hope not! They swear much more around me than they do in front of 
their mothers.” She laughs. “And they pick me up a lot. They 
uplift me. And, no, that wasn’t a metaphor — they literally pick me up! Uini especially.”

There’s a lot of this banter: Johansson jokes they only spend about 40 percent of their rehearsal time actually practising – “the rest is talking about rugby, mocking each other and listening to sounds”.

But now it’s time to work. Tonight they’re practising Goldilocks and the Three Little Puaka, Johansson’s reworking of the kids’ canon featuring, among others:

“A villain and a hero and a damsel in distress,

“There’s a pimp, there’s a playa, there’s a Samoan in a dress.”

Johansson calls it a “panto-rhyme”, an hour-long romp where fairytales are given a Southside flavour. She’s choreographing the Seven Krumping Dwarves scene, where the “Hi Ho Hi Ho” song is followed up by Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”.

But before Snow White appears, one of the three little piggies (Tyrone the gangsta pig) rocks up.

“Hey what’s the haps with you seven little chaps,

“You sing and dance around like seven tiny midget clowns.”

The rhymes are silly — seriously silly — but the buffoonery of these untypical thespians is stupidly compelling. After a dance number — has there ever been anything more preposterous than an all-male troupe of giants swing-dancing? — they break for Jolly drinks and more mocking. But what does it all mean? “There’s no messages in Goldilocks bro,” Revell says, laughing. “ It’s just freakin’ funny.”

The self-deprecating South Auckland slapstick ‘freshie humour’ inevitably invites comparisons with The Naked Samoans, but the Friars are younger, bigger and far more protean. They’re angrier too: the suggestion that they might somehow be inheriting the mantle riles these young men who see their famous forbears as almost black minstrel-like, serving up happy-go-lucky FOB fare for middle New Zealand’s amusement.

“They seem to have no concept how language and culture contribute to identity,” says Johansson, who’s of Tongan descent. “At the moment, they’re the greatest Pasifikan storytellers but they’re not telling all our stories.

“bro’Town takes the worst aspects of Polynesian people and makes them the only characters we see. They steal all the beauty and soul that is the Pacific and leave us with what? Drunken, dole-bludging gamblers.

“Nice.”

Several times Johansson and her boys have put the hard questions to The Naked Samoans. Once dapper Samoan Vau Atonio, Uini’s 19-year-old brother, bailed up Oscar Kightley during a Q&A session at Auckland’s Maidment Theatre.

Son of a welder and a hotel cleaner, the elder Atonio was Wesley’s dux and recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Top Scholars to Auckland University. He takes up the story. “I asked him, ‘Why do you continuously stereotype Polynesians so negatively?’ And he wouldn’t answer the question. Instead he asked what school I was from — I was in sixth form at the time — and, when I said Wesley, he started going on about how good we were at rugby.

Michelle Johansson: “I commend The Naked Samoans. They are fabulous at their craft. It’s just a pity there’s so many holes in their stories. It’d be nice to have Polynesians as winners once in a while.”

“He was trying to be nice I think. He’s not a bad guy. But he still didn’t answer my question.”

“I commend them [The Naked Samoans] for what they do,” adds Johansson. “They’re fabulous at their craft. It’s just a pity there’s so many holes in their stories. It’d be nice to have Polynesians as winners once in a while.”

Nevertheless, the fact Kightley’s characters resonate so strongly with New Zealanders suggests they’re not merely caricatures. The Friars themselves resound with stories of the South Auckland badlands: several of them admit to running with youth gangs and Johansson tells the harrowing story of a former Friar, one of the most talented performers she’d seen, whose drunk father beat him and told him he could never act again.

“I’m not saying what they [Naked Samoans] say is entirely untrue. But there are other truths.” And telling these, she says, is the Black Friars’ mission. Talk to her in the classroom, the walls bedecked in positive exhortations to her students, and the message of self-betterment is unmistakable. Indeed, it’s the very reason for the Friars.

“We kinda started because of Lauie [Sila],” Johansson says. “There was just so much talent there that he was never going to do anything with... he was just going to smoke his life away. He was going nowhere last year. He had these dead-end jobs — he was driving a forklift for a while and then he got work cutting up raw meat.”

When a fired-up Billy Revell returned from the Globe, and when Vau Atonio decided that he wanted to act in plays rather than just read about them in musty lecture theatres, Johansson had the beginnings of the company. “The three of us got talking and in my heart is Lauie sitting there with no job and interest and all this talent going to waste.”

Revell then remembered a pub he’d walked past while he was in London that used to be a Shakespearean theatre. The Black Friars.

“I latched on to it straight away,” says Johansson. “Even before I looked it up, I just loved the name.”

Really, it had to be Shakespearean. For all the irreverence of Goldilocks, for the politics of Being Brown, Shakespeare is, in Sila’s words, “the shit”. Stories are still told at Wesley of a famous Shakespeare duel that took place in 2005 after Sila returned from an intensive week-long Shakespeare workshop.

“He came back all cocky,” says Johansson. “And he decided to take me on in a monologue battle during seventh-form drama.

“He started off with Orlando’s opening speech from As You Like It — I hit back
with Angelo’s speech from Measure for Measure. He did Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet; I did Rosalind’s closing from As You Like It. And so it went on. The kids in my class ran out and burst in the other classes saying, “Come. Quick. Lauie is trying to out-Shakespeare Miss!”

The result is contested to this day — Sila ended with Hamlet’s suicide speech, Johansson with Othello’s deathbed effort. Shrewd move on her behalf. Othello is the Friars’ favourite Shakespeare and the play they’ll perform next February at Auckland University’s Fale Pasifika — Othello as the only white man in a sea of Samoan Moors.

Stories are still told at Wesley of a famous Shakespeare duel that took place in 2005. “Lauie came back all cocky,” says Michelle Johansson. “And he decided to take me on in a monologue battle during seventh-form drama. The kids in my class ran out and burst in the other classes saying, “Come. Quick. Lauie is trying to out-Shakespeare Miss!”

Two weeks before Being Brown’s debut, the Friars gather at Johansson’s mum’s place in Manurewa for a rehearsal, some worlds away from the city’s snooty theatre set.

It’s the Atonio brothers’ birthdays — Johansson has bought them a Black Forest gateau — which the crew wash down with two 15-piece KFC buckets. They talk about Wesley’s game yesterday against St Paul’s, and Counties-Manukau development squad prop Uini Atonio re-enacts his bludgeoning try from eight, or was it 18, metres out. Johansson’s son Moni, seven, stands in as the luckless tackler.

And then they start talking about tomorrow. Revell, oddly enough, likens the Friars to The Naked Samoans and his conciliatory tone hints that the young guns may yet learn to co-exist with the old guard. “However, I want to stretch our material,” he says. “We’ll always do Shakespeare, of course. But Vau and I have been learning a lot of Samoan history going way back. We want to tell those stories.”

“The word ‘theatre’ has unfortunate connotations,” Vau Atonio interjects. “Pompous. And snobbish. But when our people see that theatre is fun and we can interpret our own lives, our own cultures, our own generations into our work, then they’ll see theatre’s not just about being on stage and being boring.

“We’re not only here to be the fobs on the street, or rugby players or those who lack an education. As someone who’s first-generation and New Zealand-born, I believe Islanders are successful in life and do become what we want to be when we really put our minds to it.

“I want to be an actor. I love being live — seeing the reaction of people in front of you.

“I really want to crack it in the theatre world.”

First published in Sunday magazine in 2008.