'Folks You Meet in Longs' is rolling in the aisles

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Theater Critic

•	'Folks You Meet in Longs' Kumu Kahua Theatre 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays; extended through Aug. 8 $5-$16 536-4441

Kumu Kahua has reprised this production from its premiere last year and brought back the original cast. The actors have settled in and found their grooves, and the material feels sharper and smoother. If you liked it the first time, you'll like it even more now.

Cataluna (an Advertiser columnist) has a knack for presenting familiar experience in an insightful way. And what could be more familiar than the inside of a Longs Drug Store? Up and down the aisles are ordinary people, telling their stories in a way that is much more than ordinary.

The dialogue has a zesty pidgin rhythm and cadence and is presented in monologue form. Each character vignette overlaps with the next, and pauses, reactions, and facial expressions add much of the humor.

Dawn Gohara plays the cashier who opens and closes the show. She's a veteran employee of 20 years who has seen it all, four times over. What follows are the highlights of that experience.

Everyone in the cast gets more than a few good acting opportunities, and director Keith Kashiwada has shaped a fast-moving evening that flows easily and feels connected, despite the monologue format.

Janice Terukina is delightful, yakking away about Harriet, a fellow shopper who slipped on a bathmat while pulling up her pantyhose, cracked open the toilet with her head and turned blue from lying in a puddle of bowl cleaner. The unlucky Harriet is in the hospital, in a coma or with a concussion — "something that starts with a 'c'."

Appropriately for a drugstore, a theme of bodily functions and noises runs through the monologues, and things most intimate and personal become the issues of primary concern.

Pukaua Ah Nee advises Denise Colon quite publicly on the right makeup choices to hide a "hickey necklace." Daryl Bonilla tells a hilarious tale of how a bad plate of lemon chicken caused him to suffer an attack of diarrhea on his father's lawn at 1 a.m.

Ah Nee scores again as an office worker shunned by the rest of the staff for having had too much to drink at an after-work party. Colon neatly shifts character to that of an intimidating high-school girl who seeks out fights to toughen up. Bonilla reappears as a shopper with a canned-ham jelly fixation, which Colon parallels with a pickled mango dependency.

Pamela Staats plays an aged Hawaiian grandmother who defiantly proclaims that she's grown old, but not smart, "so find somebody else to be your kapuna!" She also has a nice turn as a sex-hungry matron who finds relief by ogling macho attendants at the car wash.

Other good contrasts come from Chance Gusukuma as a babe-chasing young slick and a bent old-timer, crippled from plantation labor. Wil Kahele is a flaming do-nothing buying up coffee filters to make fake kahilis, a troubled middle-aged child molester, and a wonderfully self-absorbed, fast-talking policeman.

Albert "Maka" Makanani Jr. plays the ukulele and appears as a fearsome debt collector. Meanwhile, employees stock shelves and ring up sales, a realistic backdrop for the revealing string of crackpot character studies that make up the action.

The last image is curious. It's that of a woman inching down the aisle on her knees like a penitent, creating the notion of drug store as modern-day cathedral ministering to the human needs of its flock and always ready to ask "How may I help you?"