A talented cast and imaginative choices by the design team make Diamond Head Theatre's production of “;The Joy Luck Club”; a welcome revisiting of a familiar story. Set designer Willie Sabel, lighting designer Dawn Oshima and sound designer Mikel J. Humerickhouse make inspired use of their opportunities to enhance the work of director Reiko Ho's talented cast.

Sabel's stark multilevel set includes compartments from which props are retrieved as needed. The backdrop becomes a screen on which some pivotal events occur in silhouette. Numerous sound cues add to the sense of place.

Cast members double as stagehands in positioning and removing tables and chairs to define various locations or establish the relationships between four Chinese immigrant women, their Chinese-American daughters and other characters.

Karen Kuioka Hironaga plays Suyuan Woo with Jennifer En Ya Yee as her daughter, Jing Mei Woo. The other mother-daughter pairs are Denise Aiko Chinen (Lindo Jong) and Aya Ohara (Waverly Jong), Elissa Dulce (An-Mei Hsu) and Kathryn Mariko Lee (Rose Hsu Jordan), and Blossom Lam Hoffman (Ying-Ying St. Clair) and Julia Nakamoto (Lena St. Clair).

The daughters know little if anything about the horrendous hardships their mothers survived in China before leaving for the United States. The mothers worry about the Americanization of their daughters. Director Ho, who also directed a production of “;Joy Luck Club”; for Kumu Kahua in 1999, doesn't soften the horrors, but the lighter moments register more strongly this time.

Chinen earned laughter on opening night in the scene where young Lindo improvises her way out of an empty, unconsummated marriage. The neatly balanced interplay between Kathryn Mariko Lee and Scott Francis Russell (Ted Jordan) makes Rose's big breakthrough a moment to cheer. Kevin Keaveney has a great scene playing Waverly Jong's socially inept Caucasian fiancee, and another as a well-intentioned minister delivering platitudes at a funeral while members of the congregation are arguing.

And there's Ron Encarnacion's comic turn as a deaf piano teacher who can't hear his unwilling pupil's mistakes.

The dark moments are still dark. Dulce gives a heart-rending performance as a mother grieving for a lost child and hoping to appease the dragon that has taken him. Hoffman articulates the horror of giving birth to an hideously deformed baby. We watch a woman commit suicide so that her children will have a better life, and hear stories of rape, abortion and wartime hardships.

Yee becomes pre-eminent as novelist Amy Tan's protagonist, but she portrays An-Mei's mother in another of the show's darkest flashbacks; Hironaga exudes malice as the malevolent villain of An-Mei's story.

Dark and empty as the mothers' lives generally seem to be, there is a strong sense of hope and progress. The mothers' decision to share their stories with their daughters helps their daughters move forward with their own lives. Two gain the strength to stand up to insensitive husbands, and Jing-Mei's journey ends with a trip to China to reunite with the stepsisters long believed to have died.