Local writer and teacher Lee Tonouchi's "Living Pidgin" is a compilation of Tonouchi's essays, poems, skits and short stories pieced together by Kumu Kahua artistic director Harry Wong III and acted with considerable spirit and energy by an eight-member cast. The unifying theme is the assertion that local kids can achieve any goal they choose without being hampered by speaking pidgin English.

The evening's opening and closing scenes bookend that claim with a list of opportunities denied to pidgin-speakers, created by Tonouchi's writing students ("Dey say if you talk pidgin you no can. ...) and a pep talk emphasizing the positive ("No, can. ...").

But the conglomeration of material between the opening and the closing messages does little to prove the point. In fact, one scene counters the argument by focusing on a young man who gives up his dream of becoming a Hawaiian hero to return to his PlayStation.

And while Wong creates some continuity by having everyone in the cast at one time or another impersonate Tonouchi's signature appearance — glasses, moustache and backward baseball cap — the evening is filled with stops and starts. This is not surprising given the nature of the original material.

We can pause, go back to re-read, and take time to contemplate a poem or a short essay, but in the theater each scene must make its point clearly and immediately. There is no going back and, if a point is missed, it usually remains lost.

The overall production is filled with dead ends and not smoothed out into a successful whole. As one scene quickly merges into another, the evening takes on the tone of an unstructured home video — an accurate depiction of common events perhaps, but lacking the shape and structure to give it meaning for an audience.

The image of artless reality is set early in the play by an intrusive actor claiming to be making a video presentation by taping the audience with a hand-held camera. He can't afford proper lighting and lacks the expertise to frame his shots but excuses the shortfalls with a flippant "Hey! It's a documentary!"

"Living Pidgin" is filled with redundancies and plays for two unnecessarily long acts. It suffers from the added discomfort of a seating arrangement that has nearly a quarter of the audience directly facing a blank wall and forced to view the action from a 45-degree angle.

Attending is a bit like being trapped into watching the video- tape of a relative's baby lu'au. We may sit politely but hope for an opportunity to step outside.