The unfortunate thing about Eric Anderson's "Another Heaven" is that its potentially most interesting character is relegated to a minor supporting role.

Anderson's new play at Kumu Kahua is based on the historical 1889 lynching of Katsu Goto, a Japanese shopkeeper in the plantation town of Honoka'a on the Big Island. It is a crime largely forgotten, and Anderson's intent is to examine why it has not been remembered.

Accordingly, the phrase "This much is known" becomes the play's refrain, setting up the sketchy historical facts as the dramatic spine on which to hang the playwright's imagined essence of the Goto story. What emerges is a patchwork of petty appetites and personal character flaws, sewn into a banal conspiracy to deny Katsu Goto his human rights — and his life.

Goto — played with low-key but righteous morality by Shiro Kawai — gets only two short scenes in Anderson's treatment of his story. In the first, he demands "justice" from the owner of the sugar plantation who mistreats his workers. In the second, he strikes a chord with the owner's lonely wife by recognizing that they are "both strangers here."

But the script never explores the motivation that sets up Goto as the interpreter (he is the only man in Honoka'a who speaks English and Japanese) and champion of the exploited plantation workers. Is the role thrust upon him by circumstance? Or is he something more than a simple shopkeeper who likes to keep his merchandise and his relationships tidy?

Instead, Anderson's play is a study of the price paid by Goto's murderers and others who contributed to the social fabric that surrounded his death. Although the cast and director Sammie Choy do respectable work in attempting to round out the characters, none of them emerge as much more than stereotypes.

The plantation owner (Frank Episale) is a personally insecure and ignoble whiner, poorly hidden behind a Victorian sense of entitlement. His wife (Laura Bach Buzzell) is a pallid, enabling victim.

Goto's merchant competitor (Patrick Torres) is alternately a pumped-up or panic-drenched petty bureaucrat. His wife (Nina Buck) makes desperate choices in surviving her social confines.

The plantation luna (Phillip Thomas Bullington) is a textbook bully, and the script's token Hawaiian (Will Ha'o) is a Tonto-like noble savage. Josh Greenspoon plays a scummy coward and Brent Yoshikami is a 19th-century, Big Island version of inspector Charlie Chan.

Taken all together, the characters represent a mildly odorous milieu of self-serving, commonplace brutality and apathy. There are no villains of stature among them, nor any heroes of the common man.

Consequently, the answer to why nobody remembers the murder of Katsu Goto may simply be that the people who wrote the contemporaneous history of Honoka'a didn't care about it. Unfortunately, without a more strongly developed central character, the audience for this play is similarly given little to care about as well.