David Furumoto's "Obake," now at Tenney Theatre for Honolulu Theatre for Youth, is all about context.

A fog of incense blankets the audience while paper lanterns shine overhead and swags of fishnets left over from "The Little Mermaid" decorate the walls. The rocks of the forestage support H. Bart McGeehon's teahouse structure. It seems solid and straightforward — until sliding shoji screen panels make it a theatrical, life-size Rubik's Cube as they repeatedly reveal, conceal and divide the main playing area.

The moving panels are an effective visual metaphor for the drama, since kabuki-style theater tends to stretch out a moment so that it can be appreciated and enjoyed, in the same way that a Japanese tea ceremony does much more than slop liquid into a cup.

The shoji screens focus our attention, telling us what to watch and determining when we will see it.

"Obake" is written, directed, and performed by Furumoto, with a supporting cast of HTY players. Much of the dialogue is intoned, and the familiar resonance that Furumoto produces — hollow and flavored like it originated deep inside a moist whiskey barrel — fills the theater.

One might hope that those sights and sounds would be enough to carry the performance.

But the downside of the kabuki context is that it requires fair amounts of advance knowledge and a good supply of personal discipline. Both ingredients are not likely to be automatic in a school — or adult — audience.

The script starts out straightforwardly enough, as students explore an old graveyard for a school project. A blind musician brushes up against the spirit world and earns his new nickname of "Earless" Toichi. A couple of comic travelers rattle around a forest inn on a dark and stormy night. The old cemetery man gives the student explorers a heck of a scare.

But when the scary tales take over, they lack the jolt necessary for proper shock value. Then, Samantha Fromm's period Asian costumes and Newton Koshi's wigs and makeup aren't enough to keep the action from slipping into the dark recesses of Hideake Tsutsui's shadowy lighting design.

Mostly, we find ourselves tiring of peering too deeply into the shadows and working too hard at sorting out the scary parts inside all of that context.

Ultimately, style can be very rewarding, but when it overshadows substance, as it does in "Obake," we tend to give up on it.

Joe Rozmiarek has reviewed theater performances in Hawai'i since 1973.