"Rolling the R's," by playwright, novelist and poet R. Zamora Linmark, takes place "someplace dangerous and beautiful — like Kalihi."

But it's the Kalihi of the 1970s, and the high school students who populate the core of the play are working through their identity-seeking years by fantasizing on American popular music and television shows. They are also coming to grips with their sexuality and immigrant culture, and learning to speak English without a Filipino accent.

Linmark and director Harry Wong III give the underlying serious material a disarmingly light touch and incorporate classical staging techniques to underscore the script's poetic elements.

Only the central character of Vincente (M.J. Gonzalvo) is a discrete presence. Two other roles — Edgar (Jason Kanda) and Katrina (Maila Rondero) — jockey for central focus, but also join other cast members in the Greek chorus that represents the social fabric beneath the action.

The chorus members perform as a unit, but primarily speak in parts, often from behind crude masks built from paper plates on sticks which are passed along to allow several actors to contribute one character. While the chorus members play multiple parts, some of them gain supporting status — notably Joy Lacanieta and Jaedee-Kae Vergara as a pair of neighborhood gossips and social/moral arbiters and Christopher Takemoto-Gentile as the only haole boy in the school.

Some characters perform poetic monologues masquerading as book reports or cryptic haikus that give quick insights cloaked in vernacular speech.

Thanks to a quick and lively pace and excellently disciplined performances, all this plays much more accessibly than it might sound. Actors slip among their parts with quicksilver ease, giving the impression that they are natively-bright teenagers playing a pretend game where made-up rules are constantly changing.

It's an apt metaphor for the lives they lead.

Vincente is a sweet, shy and earnest boy, complicated only by the homosexual drives that he desperately bottles up. By contrast, Edgar is a young gay who is unabashedly out of the closet, but flamboyant only in his studied copy of the John Travolta role in "Saturday Night Fever."

Katrina is a confident young woman, ashamed at having an unknown father and carving an assertive persona that avoids the extremes of butch and girly-girl, but can't express itself without vulgarity.

All three are groping toward a sense of themselves but are hampered by youth, ignorance and cultural instability. Perhaps the best illustration of that confusion comes in a remarkable scene in which Edgar shifts among six alternate personality approaches as Vincente calls for them in random, chaotic sequence.

The playwright gives his characters no resolution and little growth, leaving them in a pulsating, flashing disco dance that constitutes their perpetual limbo.

Set design by Chesley Cannon nicely matches that mood. A background of schoolroom chalkboards is topped by a television monitor bearing scene titles, and a rotating mirrored ball supplies the disco flavor.

Audiences who demand a linear story line and a tidy conclusion won't be fully satisfied. But anyone who can appreciate an unusual approach to a narrow slice of time and character will find some provocative theater at Kumu Kahua.

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has been reviewing theater since 1973.