Two wealthy gay men make arrangements with the modern-day owners of an inn in Samoa for a full-costume, 24/7 re-enactment of Somerset Maugham’s classic short story “Rain.” The owners retain several friends to join them in playing the characters and recruit a passer-by to play the pivotal role of Reverend Davidson, but a powerful supernatural entity intervenes and the men who actually arrive at the inn turn out to be Maugham and his longtime companion, Gerald Haxton.

Maugham and Haxton believe that the year is 1916 — the year the two men visited Samoa. The others assume the visitors are acting in character for their own amusement. Meanwhile, the supernatural entity cuts them all off from the outside world and pursues his own agenda.

Welcome to Kumu Kahua’s world-premiere production of “The Holiday of Rain.” The story is a new career-best for island playwright Victoria Nalani Kneu­buhl, and the production is must-see local theater.

Kneubuhl reveals her opinion of Maugham and his work in her playbill notes, but this is not agitprop theater. Indeed, as written by Kneu­buhl and brought to the stage by director Harry Wong III and actor Tony Nickelsen, Maugham is a surprisingly sympathetic figure. He’s deeply conflicted about his sexuality. He’s determined to “do the right thing” and marry a woman he impregnated even if it means giving up his relationship with Haxton. And when Haxton criticizes his sensationalist portrayal of Samoa, the “natives,” Sadie Thompson and the missionaries, Maugham replies that he writes what his readers want to read and conforms to their expectations of life in the tropics being “grit and flies and heat.”

Writing for one’s audience is as important for commercial success in 2011 as it was in Maugham’s time.

Nickelsen and director Wong do a brilliant job humanizing a character that could easily be played as a two-dimensional buffoon. Tyler Tanabe (Haxton) hits every shading and nuance in an equally complicated and demanding role.

Kneubuhl surrounds Maugham and Haxton with a colorful collection of interesting characters and damaged souls. Some become dangerously absorbed by the characters they’re playing.

Danielle Zalopany seethes and smolders with eye-catching effectiveness as a guilt-ridden young woman who sinks so deeply into the role of Mrs. Davidson that she loses touch with reality. Eleanor Svaton is riveting as the woman who becomes so personally invested in the role of Sadie that she teeters on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Craig Howes dominates much of the action in the dual roles of the not-quite-all-powerful Aleister Crowley and the Rev. Davidson.

Lauren Ballesteros voices Kneu­buhl’s editorial commentary as a literary expert who hates Maugham and his treatment of Pacific islanders and women but is fascinated by the guest, who, she assumes, is an expert on Maugham and his works.

Eventually everything doubles back on itself. Maugham is unaware that he and Haxton are watching people playing characters he created, assumes the characters are real, and uses them as source material for a short story he plans to write. Haxton tells Maugham the people around them “don’t seem right” and that the place is “a madhouse.”

By the time it’s over, Kneu­buhl has shared her opinion of Maugham in the context of an engaging and thoroughly entertaining story.