The Honolulu Theatre for Youth captures the meditative and spiritual mood of "A Thousand Cranes" in a scaled-down production that has been playing to school audiences on the Neighbor Islands, and is now in public performances at its Tenney Theatre home base.

Written for the stage by Kathryn Schultz Miller, the play is based on the real-life story of Sadako, who was only 2 years old when the atomic bomb fell on her home in Hiroshima. Ten years later, Sadako died from what was called "the A-bomb disease."

Before her death, Sadako set out to fold a thousand origami paper cranes, believing that doing so could make her well.

Miller's play — and its sensitive treatment by HTY guestdirector Reiko Ho — focuses on the young girl's humanity and the effect of her death in focusing attention toward peace instead of destruction.

HTY's stripped-down touring version is enacted by a cast of three (Dusty Behner, Stephanie Kuroda, and Hermen Tesoro Jr.) playing multiple parts. But the imaginative use of masks, Butoh dance movements, music and effective projected backdrops expand the action, capturing and fully satisfying audience imagination.

We first see Sadako in the full bloom of her youth, preparing to enter and win a footrace competition. But as her disease becomes known, the play leaves realism behind for a blend of mysticism and symbolism.

Masks are used effectively as Sadako is visited by her grandmother and meets her ancestors. Slow, meditative movements of Butoh dance underscore her acceptance of and transition to her death.

Dialogue is sensitively oblique and softly tangential to the central character's dilemma.

"What did you wish for, Sadako?"

"For you to live. For me to be well. I wished there would never be another bomb like that again ..."

The real Sadako only completed two-thirds of her thousand cranes, but the play does not see this as a shortfall.

In one precise, economical line, the playwright frees Sadako from her task, shifts emphasis from an individual child to the greater community, and expands the story's scope from sustaining a single life to that of a global effort toward peace.

"It is better," says her grandmother," for others to finish the cranes."

Sadako's school friends completed the cranes for her, and Hawai'i audiences are invited to fold their own and bring them to this production. Afterward, they will be sent to Hiroshima and added to those that continue to be placed at Sadako's memorial.