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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, September 2, 2009

'Statehood Project' works bittersweet


By JOSEPH T. ROZMIAREK
Special to The Advertiser

'THE STATEHOOD PROJECT'

Kumu Kahua Theatre

8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Sept. 20

$5-$16

536-4441

www.kumukahua.org

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The cumulative view of 16 writers whose works constitute Kumu Kahua's "The Statehood Project" is vague nostalgia for something that has been lost. Capturing a line from Joni Mitchell's 1970 "Big Yellow Taxi" sums up that sentiment — "You don't know what you got till it's gone."

It's said that Mitchell wrote that line on her first trip to Hawai'i when she looked out of her hotel window to find that "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot."

Mitchell said it most succinctly with music. The authors of "The Statehood Project" are more ambivalent, suggesting that although things aren't what they used to be, they probably never were.

Co-directed by Harry Wong III and Jason Ellinwood, the collection of monologues, scenes and stories written by Hawai'i playwrights, poets and storytellers look back over the last 50 years of Hawaiian statehood and verify that things are different today. But there is no clear indictment that statehood is the culprit.

However, they indict the usual suspects — military, tourism, outsiders, overdevelopment and greed. And while the works don't draw a direct connection to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, there is an emotional dotted line that points backward toward that event and to even earlier history.

While there is no identified manifest destiny that would make statehood inevitable, there is a real sense that change can't be prevented. Marion Lyman-Mersereau articulates that frustration in John Wythe White's "First Star Off," pleading that Hawai'i secede from the Union and that "nobody new be allowed in."

Many of the individual pieces run together, despite the stage manager's announcing a new work and unveiling a large photograph to illustrate its theme. As a result, the oddball humorous pieces stand out, like Ryan Oishi's "Ballad of the Oldest Goat on Kaho'olawe" and Sage U'ilani Takehiro's "State Throne" — which turns out to be a communal outhouse.

The strongest characterizations go to Wil Kahele as a care home resident who continually bests his caregiver at therapy exercises and as a Hawaiian farmer who pleads that developers leave him enough pure water.

The evening ends with Sean T.C. O'Malley's tangential "Bringing Donna Home" — an effectively plaintive monologue delivered by a husband in search of his missing wife. She's a Hawai'i native who spent most of her life motorcycling among Mainland cities, but who has disappeared into her home state on her 50th birthday.

Collectively, the works share the bittersweet longing to stop sand from slipping through an hourglass.