A Slow Cup of ‘Kona’

The setting is exotic, but the story is familiar. On a coffee farm in rural Kona, Hawaii, 1929, a Japanese emigre coffee farmer (Dana Lee) believes his sons should stay at home and work the fields. He can no longer walk, so the tentacles of guilt he casts around them are especially powerful.

His sons see something else for themselves. Their mother (Shizuko Hoshi) expresses devotion for her men by performing hygienically intimate tasks--shaving beards, cleaning the wax from their ears and snipping their toenails with meticulous care. Here, parental expectation is as unavoidable as the monotony of the daily chores.

In this world, playwright Edward Sakamoto sets up a classic father-son struggle. “The Taste of Kona Coffee,” now at East West Players, is the third (though chronologically the first) in a trilogy of Hawaiian plays, which started with “Manoa Alley” in 1979. “Kona” is a careful and lovingly considered play that in fact suffers from an excess of consideration. After the story’s central struggle is stated at the start of the play, the drama remains frozen in place until, like a freeze-frame released from a two-hour pause button, it commences suddenly forward to conclude the evening.

Aki (Jeret Ochi) has already cut out for the big city, Honolulu, making him a figure of glamour to the young women back home. Stuck on the farm, Aki’s younger brother Tosh (John Cho) dreams of nothing but leaving his hardscrabble life behind for the opportunities of big-city living. So Tosh sends for Aki to come home and help him leave the farm.

Aki arrives and, two stage hours later, Tosh still has not broken the news. An unspoken dance of power and sway has been conducted between father and sons, but no one has altered an iota. In fact, the only thing that has transpired is a courtship dance: Aki, with a touch of the city slickness, woos a local girl, Tomi (Janice Terukina), while Tomi’s social-climbing sister Haruko (Kathrine Keiko Nakano), whose unbearable coquettishness indicates she has seen one too many Mary Pickford flicks, throws herself at Aki with more determination than skill.

As the shy sister, Terukina gives a lovely performance that grows in intensity but is never pushed. She offers an appealing balance of pragmatism and selflessness. When her character’s worth goes unrecognized by her own father, her heartbreak, which is free of self-pity, is a luminous moment in the play.

Mako, artistic director of East West since its founding in 1965 until he left in 1989, returns to direct a cast of actors who by and large strain to breathe life into this mostly action-free evening.

BE THERE

“The Taste of Kona Coffee,” East West Players, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 9. $23. (213) 660-0366. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.