‘Koi’ swims about in his dysfunctional world

In the program notes for Kumu Kahua’s production of "Koi, Like the Fish," Maui playwright Keali’iwahine Hokoana says her aim was to explore "shades of gray, because life is never black and white."

That she does. The ending certainly left me feeling gray.

The work opens in the living room of a typical old-style Maui house: well-worn rattan furniture, aloha-print drapes, a screen door that perennially squeaks and slams. The 60-something man of the house — in T-shirt and swim trunks, his feet bare — putters around the room.

Jamie, a ditsy new postal delivery woman — played rather stiffly but still charmingly by Danielle Zalopany — arrives with a package that has to be signed for. At first the man refuses with a kolohe smile.

"That not me," says the character, believably played by veteran actor John H.Y. Wat. 

He doesn’t answer to his given name, George. No, he’s "Koi, like the fish," a nickname derived from the large pond of ornamental fish he keeps in the backyard.

Jamie urges him to make a bucket list of things to do in retirement, and he busily scribbles throughout the play. The two flirt a bit, despite the difference in their ages, and Koi comes off as a kolohe but harmless old character with a strong spark of life in him.

Not so. Koi is dying. When his son Guy visits, Koi admits he’s retired for health reasons and asks the young man to live with him to help. But Guy, played by Jonathan Reyn, is about to be married, and his fiancee wants a big, modern house in Maui Lani (the Mililani of Maui), not a plantation-era shack. Guy has a solution, though: Why doesn’t Koi invite his financially strapped niece, her husband and baby to live with him?

We think we’re drifting into a happy dream of a loving island-style extended family, the young couple relieved to have a rent-free home, Koi cherished and cared for in his final days. 

But, again, not so. After the arrival of niece Josepha (played by Nani Morita), her husband, Bryce (played by Reb Beau Allen), and their child, things grow increasingly acrimonious.

Koi is revealed to be a self-centered, penny-pinching, good-time guy who shunned family responsibility all his life; he never even married Guy’s mother when she was hapai. 

Guy is equally unwilling to tend to his own kuleana, more interested in bluffing his way though his fiancee’s over-the-top wedding plans.

The play is punctuated with comic moments, as when Guy tells Koi about being pestered to pick wedding colors. He chooses the first one proposed, navy blue, "because that’s the color of the deepest part of the ocean and that’s how deep my love is for you," Guy gushes mendaciously to his bride. 

"Wen’ work?" asks Koi, who, like his son, views relationships as a tug of war.

"Yeah," Guy crows and they cackle in triumph.

Josepha, whom everyone calls Yo, is a housewife, and Bryce, an underemployed construction worker. They are reaching the place in marriage where the bloom is off the plumeria. Promised they will inherit the house, they empty the old man’s checking account for remodeling supplies. Bryce is determined to tear out Koi’s fishpond, where one, lone granddaddy of a fish swims sluggishly. Predictably, Koi sees himself in the grizzled, honorable survivor. 

They argue about everything from what to watch on TV to Koi’s pack rat ways.

"This is MY house," Koi thunders repeatedly.

Throughout, Wat hits the right notes without seeming to try.

Bryce, well played by Allen with a rough local-boy exterior, feels unmanned and escapes to beers with the boys or dinner at his mother’s. 

Yo is run off her feet and descends into a mixture of pain and anger that has her snapping at everyone, and her care of Koi disintegrates into elder abuse. Morita handles skillfully this transformation from Koi’s bubbly, adoring "princess" to whining, resentful servant.

Even the baby is fussy.

The stage is now set for an ending that has Koi wielding his bucket list like a samurai sword. I left glad I had seen "Koi" but unsure how to feel about one more Hawaii myth — that of the trouble-free, happy ohana — exposed. Shades of gray, indeed.