KAUPAPA | ABOUT

The Kōanga Playwrights Programme is the beating heart of the festival. Following a 3 month development period of a script and a workshop week with creatives, this is the time where audiences gather to experience the new works being read aloud for the very first time. 

I tēnei tau, we’re presenting special morning readings of these new works. Your tīkiti to SCRIPTS & SIPS will also include a delicious baked treat, keeping your puku full while the mind is ignited by the new stories.

Join us for SCRIPTS & SIPSto celebrate the work of Ellen-Moana Smith and her script LOU’S LEMONS as well as Poe Tiare Tararo & Roy Iro and their script MONKEY LULU.

LOU’S LEMONS
By Ellen-Moana Smith

A poetic, warm, and quietly humorous play about care, continuity, and living after loss. Following a new mother as she moves through kitchens, public spaces, and long nights with her baby, the play centres on Lou — a familiar presence who regulates the space: opening windows, turning on music, handling lemons, and offering practical guidance.

Through domestic rituals, friendship, and the embodied realities of early motherhood, LOU’S LEMONS explores how love and support are transmitted — not only through words, but through atmosphere, habit, and shared rhythm. As the protagonist learns to finish things on her own, the play asks what it means to carry someone forward without holding onto them, and how grief can exist alongside humour, nourishment, and life continuing.

MONKEY LULU
By Poe Tiare Tararo & Roy Iro

Some things you can outrun. Grief isn't one of them. Tiare has come home to Rarotonga to disappear into the ordinary. The clatter of Café Ariki, the easy banter of her best friend Sonny, the chaos of young Moeroa learning the ropes. She's rebuilding a life out of routine, one cup of coffee at a time.

But someone's watching. Caged just outside the café, Monkey Lulu. The last monkey of her kind on the island who sees straight through her. And somehow, impossibly, this cranky old monkey becomes the one guide Tiare didn't know she needed through the grief she can't yet name.

What follows is funny, then devastating, then funny again. Story that sneaks up on you and doesn't let go.

Set in the heat and colour of 1980s Rarotonga, MONKEY LULU is a bold, big-hearted new work about grief, love, and the unlikely places we find each other when we're ready to stop running.

NGĀ TĀNGATA | CREATIVES

Kaituhi | Writer — Ellen-Moana Smith
Kaituhi | Writer — Poe Tiare Tararo
Kaituhi | Writer — Roy Iro
Script Mentor — Victor Rodger ONZM
Dramaturg — Amber Curreen
Dramaturg — Tainui Tukiwaho