Tammy Haili'opua Baker Leads Playwriting Class at Kumu Kahua Theatre, 6/3-7/8

Kumu Kahua Theatre will be offering a playwriting class for adults with playwright Tammy Haili‘'opua Baker, beginning Sunday, June 3. This class is suitable for beginners through moderately experienced writers.

The class will be held at Kumu Kahua Theatre and will be filled on a first-come-first-served basis. For more information, or to reserve a place in the class, call the Kumu Kahua Theatre Business Office at 536-4222. For more information about this and Kumu Kahua productions, visit www.KumuKahua.org.

Beginning Playwriting with Tammy Haili‘opua Baker runs for six classes; 9am to noon, Sunday, June 3, 10, 17, 24 July 1, 8 at the Kumu Kahua Theatre, 46 Merchant Street (Corner of Merchant and Bethel), downtown Honolulu. The registration fee is $120.00. The class will include writing exercises to germinate ideas for scripting a play, developing characters, crafting dialogue, and creating scenes to build a one-act play.

A two-time recipient of the Lisa Toishigawa Inouye Award for Excellence in Playwriting Tammy Haili‘opua Baker’s English and Pidgin plays have been produced at Leeward Community College Theatre (Nanakuli and Manoa: The Story of Kahalaopuna), Kennedy Theatre (Ma‘alili and Mohala ka Lehua) and Kumu Kahua Theatre (Kupua). Baker’s Hawaiian medium plays (Kaluaiko‘olau, Mauaiaakalana, Mauiakamalo and Kamapua‘a) have toured the Hawaiian archipelago and internationally under Ka Halau Hanakeaka, a Hawaiian medium theatre troupe that finds its base in Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. As an instructor of Hawaiian there, Baker intergrades theatre into her curriculum as a means for language learning by authoring and producing short one act Hawaiian plays each semester. Originally from Kapa‘a, Kaua‘i Baker now resides with her family in Kahalu‘u, Ko‘olaupoko, O‘ahu.

Kumu Kahua productions are made possible with support from the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, celebrating more than thirty years of culture and the arts in Hawai‘i, and the National Endowment for the Arts; paid for in part by the taxpayers of the City & County of Honolulu; the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts; The Annenberg Foundation; and Foundations, Businesses and Patrons.

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