Referring to her newfound love of tae bo, Aunty Dixie, one of the characters in Kimo Armitage's uneven play "Ola Ka Lau," drives the point home down a distinctly local street. "My buns look more ono than the malasadas at Leonard's Bakery," she cracks. ‘Ola Ka Lau,’ engagingly relevant,
misses its dramatic chancesReview by Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.comWhere else could we be but Kumu Kahua, the only theatrical institution in town dedicated to the local experience? When the play proves frustrating, when its author handles such things as exposition rather clumsily, the evening still manages to generate many smiles of recognition, its audience knowing that relevance is finally more important than dramatic construction.
Composed of two interconnected plots, "Ola Ka Lau" tells the story, firstly, of Janelle (U'ilani Kapuaakuni), a young woman who is frequently on the receiving end of punches from her abusive husband, Junior (Troy Ignacio). Janelle's cousin Keola (Daryl Bonilla), meanwhile, who is devoted to freeing her from this cycle of domestic violence, is himself the object of violence, though of a different kind. Keola is suffering from a severe, perhaps terminal disease that remains unspecified. (Audience diagnosticians are free to speculate on his symptoms: nosebleeds, stomach pain and a bad leg that requires propping via a digging stick.)
Ola Ka Lau: Repeats at Kumu Kahua Theatre 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 9.
Tickets: $15 general, $10 for students and $10 for unemployed on Thursdays.
Call: 536-4441.
Keola's plight stands at the center of the story, the character pushed toward alternative medicine by his Hawaiian family (which reportedly contains "eight generations of healers") and a second direction by Janelle, who is convinced that all such remedies are mere snake oil. Where one side recommends mountain apple, the other counsels Bacitracin, a medical stalemate that's given increased urgency by Keola's steadily declining condition.
"Ola Ka Lau" is a melodrama laced with magical realist elements and yet the play demonstrates a surprising power at times, chiefly during the second act, as a result of certain developments that professional courtesy forbids me to divulge. Unfortunately, that power is often undermined by the playwright himself, who often fails to respect the mood he's created. (When Keola furiously disconnects his IV in the hospital, a trenchant moment, is it appropriate for he and Janelle to immediately begin happily reminiscing about childhood? When Aunty Dixie [Pamela Staats] hears of Janelle's domestic troubles, is it natural for her to launch into a rambling speech about her own husband, one that Janelle has likely heard before?)
Nevertheless, the contemporary quality of "Ola Ka Lau," its thorough grounding in the here and now, keeps us engaged, and this quality seems to have similarly inspired director Tammy Haili'opua Baker and several actors.
Particularly winning is Venus Kapuaala as Tutu, Keola's grandmother and the family's chief practitioner of the healing arts. For Tutu, Hawaiian plant medicine is a deeply serious business and Kapuaala's commitment to the role is so thorough that you half expect her to dispense medical advice in the lobby after the show. Daryl Bonilla, so good in the recent comedy "Aloha Friday," is believable despite being a bit out of his element here, that mile-wide grin (which manages to lift even a Bankoh commercial above the pedestrian) rarely given the chance to surface in this harrowing drama. Valerie Falle is touching as Keola's mother, and Kapuaakuni and Ignacio handle quite well their several spousal abuse scenes.
In the end, "Ola Ka Lau" is about the charms and dangers of tradition, of the difficulty of marrying a glorious past with the scientific advances of modernity. To that end, I wish that the playwright had created a more satisfying marriage. The one presented here, with nearly everyone coming down on the side of ancient medicine and Janelle the lone defector, is hopelessly lopsided, as unbalanced in a way as the marriage of Janelle and Junior. It's fine for one's sympathies to be with tradition, as Armitage's clearly are, but the best plays draw strength from an epic clash of equals.
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