Phoebe Robertson
Authors note on positionality: I came to For the Love of Spam knowing very little about Guam or CHamoru identity. As a reviewer outside this cultural context, I acknowledge that I’m writing from a position shaped by distance—geographically, culturally, and historically. My reading of the work is necessarily partial. I approach this review with deep respect for that complexity, and an awareness of my own limits.
For the Love of Spam is a genre-blending, sharp-edged, and often hilarious solo show that follows Sierra Sevilla’s CHamorou protagonist on a journey through memory, food, colonialism, and diaspora—from Guam to the US to London. At its heart is spam: canned meat as cultural touchstone, survival food, postcolonial relic, and family heirloom. It’s a show with meat, metaphorically and literally.
From its opening moments—where the protagonist prays for a typhoon so she can eat Spam (a nod to US military aid after major storms)—the production embraces its contradictions. It’s strongest when it leans into tonal shifts: punching from humour into gravity and back again, without losing control. A particularly powerful moment was the protagonist’s argument with her husband about their future children and whether they’d eat spam—at once a comic sex scene and a reflection on cultural legacy, identity, and intergenerational anxiety.
This is a show with big ideas and ambitious scope: Guam’s colonial history, the country as a geopolitical pawn, diasporic guilt and pride, food as identity, and American imperialism’s reach. The show's standout sequence—an audience-participatory countdown of 14 minutes, the estimated time for a North Korean missile to hit Guam—delivers a gut punch. As the protagonist prepares spam kelaguen and shares what she would do in those final minutes, we’re drawn into an existential intimacy that feels almost unbearable. It’s a moment of formal grounding, giving us structure, pace, and stakes.
This final scene immediately brought to my mind Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz—a performance where food becomes a charged medium for political commentary, memory, and confrontation. In Burgerz, preparing and sharing a burger is a deliberately uncomfortable act, layered with personal trauma and systemic violence. It builds toward a moment of reckoning, using food to confront the audience with the realities of identity, prejudice, and complicity.
For the Love of Spam echoes this device but uses it to different effect. It’s hard to think of a more powerful tool for cross-cultural connection than food. Everyone remembers their childhood meals, their mother’s kitchen, the thing they were ashamed to bring to school lunches. For the Love of Spam taps into this beautifully. It asks: What does it mean to love the thing that was given to you by your coloniser? What if it tastes like home? Like Burgerz, it invites an audience member onstage to share in the food—but here, the moment is tender, not confrontational. The protagonist and the guest sit side by side, eating Spam and waiting for a missile to hit. It’s quietly devastating. Where Burgerz compels us to reckon with inherited violence, For the Love of Spam makes space for contradiction—finding connection, even comfort, in the complicated legacies we carry.
Visually, the staging offered elements that invited interpretation, though some felt like they had untapped potential. The large Spam shrine/cross, while visually dominant, might have benefited from deeper integration into the narrative to clarify its symbolic weight. Its destruction occurred twice—once when the protagonist grabbed a can of Spam, and again when clearing the table—which risked diluting rather than intensifying its impact. Similarly, the Astroturf representation of Guam that was on the floor of the stage, closest to the audience, could have been more purposefully woven into the performance’s thematic or physical action. These design elements created a strong visual presence, and with further development, could carry even greater resonance.
The show makes clever use of parody—particularly of Moana’s songs—to critique commodified Pacific identities and the Disneyfication of Polynesia. But while the musical pastiche was funny, it could have pushed harder into satire or structural commentary. At times, the show’s critique was in danger of getting muddled in its many threads: the therapy sessions, livestreams, dance sequences, musical numbers. Transitions occasionally felt disjointed or unclear, and at points I found myself questioning the internal logic (for example, why a social media livestream was the chosen medium for one of the segments).
That said, the ambition is part of what makes For the Love of Spam compelling. It wants to be everything at once: a coming-of-age story, a political critique, a food memoir, a multimedia performance. Its pacing is intentionally high-octane, which at times risks leaving the audience behind. But it also captures something essential about diasporic urgency—the feeling that your history is overlooked, your homeland endangered, your culture flattened, so you have to tell it all, now, before it’s too late.
For the Love of Spam is rich with sharp writing, a singular perspective, and striking theatrical imagination. Its ability to hold contradiction—to be funny and gutting, intimate and geopolitical—makes it stand out. With continued shaping, this work has the potential to move from powerful to unforgettable—not by becoming something different, but by becoming even more itself.
You can attend For the Love of Spam at Te Auaha from Wednesday the 4th of June until Saturday the 7th of June. Visit the Kia Mau Festival’s website for a booking link and further information.
For the Love of Spam is a genre-blending, sharp-edged, and often hilarious solo show that follows Sierra Sevilla’s CHamorou protagonist on a journey through memory, food, colonialism, and diaspora—from Guam to the US to London. At its heart is spam: canned meat as cultural touchstone, survival food, postcolonial relic, and family heirloom. It’s a show with meat, metaphorically and literally.
From its opening moments—where the protagonist prays for a typhoon so she can eat Spam (a nod to US military aid after major storms)—the production embraces its contradictions. It’s strongest when it leans into tonal shifts: punching from humour into gravity and back again, without losing control. A particularly powerful moment was the protagonist’s argument with her husband about their future children and whether they’d eat spam—at once a comic sex scene and a reflection on cultural legacy, identity, and intergenerational anxiety.
This is a show with big ideas and ambitious scope: Guam’s colonial history, the country as a geopolitical pawn, diasporic guilt and pride, food as identity, and American imperialism’s reach. The show's standout sequence—an audience-participatory countdown of 14 minutes, the estimated time for a North Korean missile to hit Guam—delivers a gut punch. As the protagonist prepares spam kelaguen and shares what she would do in those final minutes, we’re drawn into an existential intimacy that feels almost unbearable. It’s a moment of formal grounding, giving us structure, pace, and stakes.
This final scene immediately brought to my mind Travis Alabanza’s Burgerz—a performance where food becomes a charged medium for political commentary, memory, and confrontation. In Burgerz, preparing and sharing a burger is a deliberately uncomfortable act, layered with personal trauma and systemic violence. It builds toward a moment of reckoning, using food to confront the audience with the realities of identity, prejudice, and complicity.
For the Love of Spam echoes this device but uses it to different effect. It’s hard to think of a more powerful tool for cross-cultural connection than food. Everyone remembers their childhood meals, their mother’s kitchen, the thing they were ashamed to bring to school lunches. For the Love of Spam taps into this beautifully. It asks: What does it mean to love the thing that was given to you by your coloniser? What if it tastes like home? Like Burgerz, it invites an audience member onstage to share in the food—but here, the moment is tender, not confrontational. The protagonist and the guest sit side by side, eating Spam and waiting for a missile to hit. It’s quietly devastating. Where Burgerz compels us to reckon with inherited violence, For the Love of Spam makes space for contradiction—finding connection, even comfort, in the complicated legacies we carry.
Visually, the staging offered elements that invited interpretation, though some felt like they had untapped potential. The large Spam shrine/cross, while visually dominant, might have benefited from deeper integration into the narrative to clarify its symbolic weight. Its destruction occurred twice—once when the protagonist grabbed a can of Spam, and again when clearing the table—which risked diluting rather than intensifying its impact. Similarly, the Astroturf representation of Guam that was on the floor of the stage, closest to the audience, could have been more purposefully woven into the performance’s thematic or physical action. These design elements created a strong visual presence, and with further development, could carry even greater resonance.
The show makes clever use of parody—particularly of Moana’s songs—to critique commodified Pacific identities and the Disneyfication of Polynesia. But while the musical pastiche was funny, it could have pushed harder into satire or structural commentary. At times, the show’s critique was in danger of getting muddled in its many threads: the therapy sessions, livestreams, dance sequences, musical numbers. Transitions occasionally felt disjointed or unclear, and at points I found myself questioning the internal logic (for example, why a social media livestream was the chosen medium for one of the segments).
That said, the ambition is part of what makes For the Love of Spam compelling. It wants to be everything at once: a coming-of-age story, a political critique, a food memoir, a multimedia performance. Its pacing is intentionally high-octane, which at times risks leaving the audience behind. But it also captures something essential about diasporic urgency—the feeling that your history is overlooked, your homeland endangered, your culture flattened, so you have to tell it all, now, before it’s too late.
For the Love of Spam is rich with sharp writing, a singular perspective, and striking theatrical imagination. Its ability to hold contradiction—to be funny and gutting, intimate and geopolitical—makes it stand out. With continued shaping, this work has the potential to move from powerful to unforgettable—not by becoming something different, but by becoming even more itself.
You can attend For the Love of Spam at Te Auaha from Wednesday the 4th of June until Saturday the 7th of June. Visit the Kia Mau Festival’s website for a booking link and further information.
Bio: Phoebe Robertson is a Pākehā writer and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She holds a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington, where she also completed a BA in Sociology and Theatre. Her work has appeared in Landfall, Takahē, Mayhem, SWAMP, Turbine, and Poetry New Zealand and her nonfiction has been recognised in essay competitions such as the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition