Kumu Kahua Theatre Needs your Donations

A Brief History of Kumu Kahua Theatre

 “Plays about life in Hawai‘i, Plays by Hawaii’s playwrights, Plays for Hawaii’s people.”  The mission of Kumu Kahua Theatre is to provide theatrical opportunities for the expression of local community lifestyles, whether contemporary or historical; to stage locally written plays set in Hawai‘i or dealing with some aspect of the Hawaiian experience of residents; to provide training and theatrical experiences for local playwrights, directors, performers, and other theatrical artists; and to develop an increasingly larger audience sensitive to plays and theatre pieces dealing specifically and truthfully with local subject matter.

Kumu Kahua Theatre has a forty year history of commitment to the cultural legacy of Hawai‘i and its diverse population through the art form of theatre. Kumu Kahua translates into “Original Stage” in the Hawaiian language.  It is the dedication to producing a genuine reflection of the life and experience of Hawai‘i that has enabled the theatre to develop into one of the most original, organic, and exciting theatre companies in the Pacific region.

The theatre began as a graduate student organization at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in 1971 that was dedicated to the production of original plays.  It soon left the wing of the university and quickly developed into a theatre dedicated to the expression of local themes, featuring local playwrights.  The theatre became an incorporated 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 1991.  Since the days of performing at the university, the theatre company performed in various performance spaces in Honolulu.  In 1994 the State of Hawai‘i completed renovations of the historic Kamehameha V Post Office Building in downtown Honolulu which included a theatre space for Kumu Kahua.  The theatre space is a black box house with flexible risers and seating.  This intimate playing house can accommodate between 100 to 120 people.

The theatre regularly produces five main season productions which run for five weekends, Thursday through Sunday.  Three developmental workshopped playreadings of works-in-progress are presented each season free of charge to the public.  An active educational program has developed since our move into the theatre space.  This includes classes and workshops regularly offered in acting, voice, and most importantly, playwriting.  An annual playwriting competition is held which helps produce scripts for our regular season of plays.  Over the past several years the theatre has begun to commission plays, give them a workshopped reading, and bring them to production.

The theatre’s audience reflects the multi-cultural issues of our plays, many in local Pidgin, the Creole language of Hawai‘i.  Hawai‘i is a land peopled by a multi-ethnic population with a rich historical and cultural legacy.  We have produced plays, both historical and contemporary, on issues concerning the native Hawaiian people, as well as plays that reflect the Asian influenced heritage of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Okinawan, Filipino cultures, etc.  The theatre actively seeks to make our performances available to the broad population of Hawai‘i by keeping our ticket prices down.  Special outreach is made through the local ethnic presses depending on the ethnic theme of the production.

Kumu Kahua has created a name for itself on an international basis as well.  In 1990 the theatre took two plays about Hawaiian history, Ka‘iulani and The Conversion of Ka‘ahumanu to the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, Washington D.C. and the Los Angeles Festival.  In 1993, the theatre created an original play with the students at the Community College of Micronesia in Pohnpei.  In December 1998, the theatre’s production of the play peregriNasyon was invited to the Philippine International Theater Festival and subsequently toured the northern provinces of the Philippines.  In the summer of 2000 the theatre was featured in a major article on Hawaii’s local theatre in The Drama Review. In 2008, we took Kamau, to the Festival of the Pacific Arts in American Samoa.

The organization is run by a 25 member working Board of Directors.  The Board assists the productions by staffing the box office on performance dates, helps build and strike the sets, re-configures the performance area, helps in fundraising, etc.  We have a full-time paid staff of two which includes the Artistic Director, Harry Wong III and Acting Managing Director, Margaret Welch.