Writers adapt 'Ricepaper Airplane' for stage

By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Staff Writer

Sung Wa (Alvin Chan), right, is caught off guard by his lover, Hae Soon (a local actress known as Grass), in "Ricepaper Airplane." Brad Goda 'A Ricepaper Airplane' 8 p.m. Thursday Kumu Kahua Theatre $5-$16 536-4441 Also: 8 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays (no show on March 14), and 2 p.m. Sundays (no show this Sunday), through April 14.

From his hospital deathbed, an elderly Korean man takes a visiting son of his cousin on a tour of a life marked by revolution, patriotism, and moments of intense happiness and deep despair. Told using flashback after flashback, and stories within stories, "A Ricepaper Airplane's" fictional narrative of the unusual life of otherwise unassuming Sung Wha Kim moves along with the grace of wind-blown grass.

In the span of 272 pages, Pak takes readers through Kim's childhood in a 1900s Korean village, young adulthood as a revolutionary in Manchuria, years laboring on an O'ahu sugar plantation, and a final act of defiance in a run-down Chinatown hotel.

On the surface, a story with as much rich detail and as many shifts in time and narrative as Pak's would seem an unlikely fit for a proper stage adaptation. And, well, it almost was.

"Well, we just beat our heads with the script a lot," director John Wat responded to a question on how he and writer Keith Kashiwada co-adapted "A Ricepaper Airplane" for the Kumu Kahua Theatre stage. The slightly dazed look on the Mid-Pacific Institute theater instructor's face testifies he's only half-kidding.

"As a writer, I liked Gary's shifts in narrative ... the story within the story within the story," said Wat. "The difficulty was just how to manage the different levels of narrative. In terms of the novel, the scale of it was huge. The scenes in Korea were huge. The path that this man follows is so big.

"And then there were these great shifts in location and time. One moment (Kim) is in Korea, the next moment he's in Hawai'i, the next moment he's in a hospital."

In addition to trying to keep the theater audience attuned to exactly where the story was at any given moment, Wat and Kashiwada had the unenviable task of condensing Pak's novel into an audience-tolerable two-hour work without losing what each originally admired most about the work.

"And because the novel was so good all the way through, we wanted to keep everything," said Wat, laughing. "The book is 272 pages. Our script is now 54 pages."

Wat and Kashiwada are actually old hands at adapting otherwise gnarly works of local literature for the Kumu Kahua stage. Together, they have co-adapted and/or directed productions of Pak's "The Watcher of Waipuna," Lois Ann Yamanaka's "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers" and Nora Okja Keller's "Comfort Woman."

"Gary's really nice to us, and so funny," said Wat. He and Kashiwada met Pak via the local literature collective Bamboo Ridge. "Some authors are really possessive of their work, and others want to be right in there helping you. But Gary is like, 'No, no, no. You guys do whatever you want to do.

"He really likes to see what we do with what he's got, and how we adapt ... and will usually give us free rein to do whatever we want."

Thankfully, Wat said, they eventually got it right with their final script, which Wat insisted hews closely to Pak's grand tale of one man's indomitable revolutionary spirit.

"It's a moving story about an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances," explained Wat.

He should know.