Five Plays Never Seen Before in Hawai`i.

This season Kumu Kahua Theater presents five Hawai`i premiere plays, four by Hawai`i writers. With this outstanding season, our commitment to producing plays for and about Hawai`i continues. Below are descriptions of each play along with scheduled performance dates.

Oscar and Ming, two gay Asian-American men, seem to be made for one another. But when Oscar tests positive for HIV, he abruptly breaks off the relationship. Both men are saddened by their separation, but neither can find a way to reunite. The play employs elements of romance, comedy and tragedy, and the language fluidly shifts between narrative and drama, prose and poetry. Transcending classification as an AIDS play or even a gay play, A Language of Their Own is a universal reflection on the nature of love, sexuality and personal identity, and the dynamics between Oscar and Ming and their new lovers typify those of any intimate relationship. Director of the Asian Theatre Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and Artistic Director of the Northwest Asian American Theatre/The Black Box in Seattle, Chay Yew's work has been produced in London, New York and several West Coast cities.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8 p.m.:
September 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29; October 4, 5, 6
Sunday 2 p.m.: September 9, 16, 23, 30; October 7

Olo Ka Lau
by James Kimo Armitage

For hundreds of years, Hawaiians took care of their ills with their own medicine, extracted from the natural environment and accompanied by chants and healing rituals. Their knowledge was passed down through the generations, from teacher to student, in the oral tradition. In modern times, with high-tech hospitals and over-the-counter medications, will the ancient ways survive? Playwright James Kimo Armitage brings this dilemma to life in a story of two brothers, one reluctant to learn from his grandmother and the other an eager student with an illness that no medicine, old or new, can cure. Olo Ka Lau explores how a Hawaiian family deals with loss and the need to carry on. Winner of the 1997 Kumu Kahua Theatre/University of Hawaii at Manoa Theatre Department Playwriting Contest.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8 p.m.:
November 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 23, 24, 29, 30; December 1, 6, 7, 8
Sunday 2 p.m.: November 11, 18, 25; December 2, 9

To the Last Hawaiian Soldier
by Sean T.C. O'Malley

In a drama that tells two parallel stories, the author of Kumu Kahua 1998-99 favorite Island Skin Songs juxtaposes the 19th-century story of King David Kalakaua, his sister Lili`uokalani and Robert Wilcox in the days before the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy with a contemporary tale about a young Hawaiian man who, frustrated by what he perceives as a lack of progress and action in the sovereignty movement, is driven to an act of terrorism. As Wilcox and his small band of Redshirts hold out in the royal palace against the Honolulu Rifles militia, Junior Koalua holds out against the FBI while his former lover tries to persuade him to surrender. In a fast-paced story of love and war, playwright O'Malley deals with the perennial problems of resorting to violence as a means of achieving idealistic ends.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8 p.m.:
January 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 31; February 1, 2, 7, 8, 9
Sunday 2 p.m.: January 13, 20; February 3, 10

A Ricepaper Airplane
Adapted from the Gary Pak novel
by John Wat and Keith Kashiwada

"Uncle...is like a book. Every day with him is like reading -- or hearing -- another chapter of an adventure story." Thus begins Gary Pak's epic tale, told by a dying man drifting in and out of consciousness, that stretches from the Hawai`i sugar plantation where he worked to his Korean homeland, from a century ago to the present, and from the earth to the sky. Kim Sung Wha -- laborer, patriot, revolutionary, aviator -- envisioned building an airplane from ricepaper, bamboo and the scrap parts of a broken-down bicycle, dreaming that it would carry him back to Korea and his wife and children. A heroic story of loss, love and rebirth from the team that adapted Pak's Watcher of Waipuna, Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, and Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman for the Kumu Kahua stage.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8 p.m.:
March 14, 16, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30; April 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13;
Sunday 2 p.m.: March 24; April 7, 14

Super Secret Squad
by Lee Cataluna

Faced with a series of indefensible decisions made by clueless bureaucrats, such as deleting the word "Rainbows" from the UH Manoa athletic teams and facing the Duke Kahanamoku statue away from the ocean in Waikiki, five undergraduates decide to take matters into their own hands and make things right again. What begin as comic pranks, however, eventually get the boys into serious trouble. With her gift for creating hilarious pidgin dialect, crazy but loveable local-style characters, and delightful plot twists and surprises, playwright and newspaper columnist Lee Cataluna keeps audiences laughing with another work of contemporary comedy along the lines of her former Kumu Kahua hits Da Mayah, Ulua: the Musical and Aloha Friday. A Kumu Kahua Playwright Commission.

Thursday, Friday & Saturday 8 p.m.:
May 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 30, 31; June 1, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15
Sunday 2 p.m.: May 19, 26; June 2, 9, 16