There are a couple of good short monologues in the new production at Kumu Kahua Theatre. Toward the end of the play, the spirit of Liliha, speaking as the bones of Hawaiian royalty, expresses the loneliness and the reunion that follow death.

But otherwise, "Ola Na Iwi" ("The Bones Live") by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl is a jumble of scenes with an identity crisis — a historical, anthropological, spiritual, mysterious and comic crime caper, as it were.

The play is concerned with timely and controversial issues involving indigenous human remains. However, in execution, it mixes Victorian skull-drudgery with a contemporary story about bone theft and a woman who mysteriously materializes to read people's minds. There hasn't been a formula stew like this one since "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

With all the characters in the play, Kneubuhl has a hard time picking one to focus on.

The role most likely to be central is that of Kawehi, a young woman who sets up museum exhibits by day and moonlights as a prop mistress for a theater group. Returning from a German tour with a Hawaiian version of "Hamlet," she smuggles home some authentic native bones she's lifted from a museum.

Tiana Marie Alcoran radiates guilt through Kawehi's customs inspection ("alas, poor Yorick," there is some humor in the script) and hunches through a plot line that has her grow progressively distracted. She can't sleep with dedicated boyfriend Erik (Miko Franconi) and loses her job to angry boss Pua (Donalyn Dela Cruz.)

Her only respite comes with the arrival of Nanea, a time-warped woman who speaks fluent Hawaiian, reads emotions like Burma Shave signs, and channels for the spirit of long-deceased Liliha.

Meanwhile, a minor German functionary (played with an oom-pa-pa accent by Britton Adams) joins up with a Samoan contact (Misa Tupou) and a Hawaiian detective (K. Leigh Rivera) to track down the missing artifacts. Periodically, some 19th-century authorities theorize over the superiority of the white race by collecting and measuring the skulls of indigenous peoples.

By all appearances, neither playwright Kneubuhl nor director Sammie Choy has yet decided how much of this is serious and how much is comic.

Actress Mane does some ditzy things as Nanea, but authentically speaks moving poetic passages as Liliha. Poor Kawehi never gets to crack a smile, but everyone dresses up in Elizabethan costumes for a pointless theater party. Real and fake bones are switched with slapstick regularity and — is anyone in Hollywood paying attention? — there is a huge car bomb explosion.

Curiously, out of all the chaos comes the steady performance beacon of Phillip Thomas Bullington, who plays several small roles with enough success that we wish he had one good large one to appear in.

No bones about it, "Ola Na Iwi" is conceptually messy.