It begins at a gravesite. It ends back there. And in between, there is a grandmother, a goddess, a carpenter’s son, and two sisters trying to make sense of everything they’ve inherited. ON GOD, by writer and director Kaisa Fa’atui, is a celestial collision grounded in the very real, very complicated realities of being young, diasporic, and Sāmoan in Aotearoa.

In a theatre veiled by cloth. Literal fabric stretched like membranes between the living and the dead, the colonised and the coloniser. Here, in that veil, we meet Losa (Jasmine Leota), the grandmother, the anchor. Leota plays her with such warmth and comedic ease that her presence feels familiar: every slap on the leg, every story over an ipu ti is an offering. Losa is the type of nanna who’s banter you will never truly serve back.

Her granddaughters Ālia (Stella Vaivai) and Māsili (Paris Tuimaseve-Fox) are trying to stay afloat. Ālia, the younger, idealistic arts student; eyes wide, heart cracked. Māsili, the eldest, doing the emotional heavy lifting of a thousand eldest daughters. We meet them in moments of mundanity, graveside cleaning, school stress, bad cups of tea, and it is in these ordinary acts that ON GOD begins to stretch something divine.

Enter Jesus (Joshua Leota) and Nafanua (Samoana Nokise), the celestial intrusions. Jesus — soft-spoken, weary, sincere. Nafanua — sharp, commanding, hilarious. These two deities are not simply symbols, they become characters grappling with their own mythologies. Jesus, bloated by centuries of spiritual imperialism and nepotism, tries to guide with grace. Nafanua, dismissed by colonial Christianity as a devil, is ready to reclaim her name, her people, her war.

But this is not a play of easy dichotomies. God vs goddess. Sāmoa vs Rome. Faith vs secularity. What Fa’atui builds instead is a stage where contradictions can sit beside each other. Where Nafanua can dance to ‘The Sound of Silence’ and Jesus can stumble on his words. Where grief is not something to be solved, but something to be witnessed.

The performances are remarkable. Vaivai’s Ālia is vulnerable and fiery, her siva with Nafanua is a moment of unspoken communion that leaves the theatre breathless. Tuimaseve-Fox is a force, her monologues delivered with such emotional precision that you feel the air shift in the room. Joshua Leota’s Jesus never veers into parody; he is rooted, human and tender. Nokise’s Nafanua is the kind of performance you write about years later. Every line, every glance, every breath, each movement is loaded. And Jasmine Leota as Losa: scene-stealing, heart-breaking, joy-bringing. Losa’s presence remains long after the curtain call.

There’s poetry in the production design. Cloth as veil, light as revelation, sound as rupture. There is a moment, near the end, when dialogue gives way to traffic noise, and the girls embrace. It is a moment untouched by divine intervention. A moment of pure, unfiltered sisterhood.

And then there is the costuming. There is a part where Losa’s granddaughter’s put her on. Not just her fabric, but her belief in them, her humour, her hope. It’s a subtle reminder of how we carry those we love.

ON GOD is a tale of intergenerational love, divine missteps, and the sacredness of small things. It asks what happens when deities meddle in earthly grief. But it answers, softly, that the real gods are the ones who sit with us in silence. It is a play that treats laughter as prayer, sisterhood as salvation, and grandmother’s love as the very definition of sacred. This isn’t just theatre. It is ceremony. It is myth rethreaded through migration, through memory, through the membranes that still and move, separate and connect us.

ON GOD is part of the Kia Mau Festival 2025 and is staged in Tapere Nui at Te Auaha. It is showing until the 1^st of June, with a matinee performance on Saturday 31^st May. See it and then call your grandmother, if you can, or listen to her favourite songs and try not to tear up on the way home.  

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