Bring the keiki.
That's a Hawaiian word for young children or "little ones." And it's the target audience for Honolulu Theatre for Youth's production of "The Carp Who Would Not Quit and Other Animal Stories."
"We did create it for the youngest audiences," playwright and director Reiko Ho said from Honolulu in early January. "But I also always create for the kid in everybody."
What she's created is a three-actor, multi-puppet production designed to inspire cultural curiosity, especially about Japanese traditions. It brings to the stage of Minneapolis' Children's Theatre Company six Japanese folk tales and fables about that resilient carp, a grateful crane and rabbits and mice making mochi (Japanese rice cakes), among other things. It also features traditions found in the annual Obon festivals that honor ancestors, including live music from a taiko drum, a shakuhachi flute and a dulcimer-like koto.
"I hope these kids all go home and ask their parents to eat mochi and sing songs and say a few Japanese words," Ho said. "And have a conversation with their family about our culture."
Ho learned about that culture while growing up in a Hawaiian household with three other generations of women of Japanese descent.
"My great-grandmother was a picture bride," Ho said, speaking of young women sent from Japan to marry a worker in Hawaii based upon photographs provided by a matchmaker. "She came out to work on the plantations when she was 14 years old, sent by her family."
It was from her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother that Ho first learned the stories found in "The Carp Who Would Not Quit."