The question of loyalty isn't presented directly, but Wendie Burbridge, a part-Hawaiian writer and an English teacher at Kamehameha Schools, is smart enough to know when it's been asked.

People have wanted to know if her sympathies were with Native Hawaiians or Americans — as if picking a side was as simple as painting a stripe through her living room. Or choosing between her parents' Hawaiian 'ohana and her husband's Nebraska roots.

"It really is kind of a clash for me to find where I sit as a Hawaiian," she says. "I don't think anybody has really asked me to take a side, but I think I'm always kind of questioned about those sides."

As the 50th anniversary of statehood in Hawai'i approached, Burbridge turned the question into inspiration. In her short play "The Dance," which is part of Kumu Kahua Theatre's observance of the anniversary, Burbridge explores what it's like to embrace two worlds, with a character whose internal struggle mirrors her own.

At a dance celebrating statehood in 1959, her main character, Mary, meets a young sailor from Omaha. He is the handsome vision of a bright, but uncertain, future that isn't purely Hawaiian.

"She has to struggle between her cultural beliefs and also her practical beliefs — how she is going to live and survive in the world and how she will be a cultural person, which I think a lot of Hawaiians nowadays go through," Burbridge says.

The new Kumu Kahua production, "The Statehood Project," is a collection of monologues, scenes and stories written by Hawai'i playwrights, poets and storytellers.

Opening Friday, it's being described as a "refreshingly different addition" to the commercial and journalistic celebration of Hawai'i's admission to the union. Its directors say they aren't taking a stand on the value of statehood, but instead wanted to provide a stage for alternative views on its historical, political and sociological significance.

"Some are poems, some are scenes and some are whacky absurdist presentations," says Harry Wong III, artistic director of Kumu Kahua and co-director of the production. "But the overall message is that it is more than just one thing. This is a complex issue. It is not really black and white."

Wong, 45, is co-directing "The Statehood Project" with Jason Ellinwood, a 25-year-old Hawaiian language major at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

'LOST STORIES'

Wong views the project as a collection of lost stories — representing the experiences of ordinary people living in the Islands in 1959 who were unsure about, or opposed to, statehood.

One of the facts that drove the theme for the project was the way statehood and its support in the Islands has been described, Wong says. Although 94 percent of Hawai'i residents voted in favor of becoming a state, only 35 percent of the population voted when ballots were cast in June 1959.

"It is the people who had to actually deal with statehood," he says. "The people who had to live their lives with this new government."

Wong, who has directed since 1991, likes "The Dance." He says Burbridge — along with her main character, Mary — underscores the dilemma many people faced: what to love and what to loathe about statehood.

"It is this weird tension and anger and attraction," he says. "When the political and the personal get tied together, there are always gray areas."

Work on the project began in January. Kumu Kahua teamed up with Fat Ulu, a local literary hui, to find the 12 writers who participated. They could write anything they wanted about statehood. Their pieces, which also will be published, were refined for the stage by Kumu Kahua, then organized into "The Statehood Project."

Fat Ulu founder Ryan Oishi, who also teaches English at Kamehameha Schools, says the project encouraged artistic freedom. His poem, "The Ballad of the Oldest Goat on Kahoolawe," is part of the production. It's the story of one goat's plan to stop military bombing of the island during the 1960s by encouraging tourism — a thinly veiled metaphor for the mass migration of visitors that statehood and the new jet age brought to Hawai'i.

"I wanted to imagine through this kind of analogy, in that moment, the sort of excitement that I think a lot of people in general had in terms of a very bright future," says the 27-year-old Oishi. "And also to reflect on some of the unanticipated outcomes of some of the choices that were made."

Before the writers began in January, they were given an overview of statehood facts by Ron Williams Jr., a 43-year-old graduate student at UH's Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies.

'PERSONAL REACTION'

Williams believes "The Dance" will move audiences, especially when they realize that its haole sailor from Omaha was allowed to vote for statehood, but his Hawai'i-born date was not because she was too young.

"For me, it brings that crystal clear, local understanding of these issues," says Williams, whose specialty is Hawaiian history. "It's not academic. It is not pro- or anti-American. It's a young girl who is Hawaiian dating a sailor, and he has a say in her becoming part of the United States and she doesn't."

For Burbridge, whose fiction has been published in Bamboo Ridge and 'Oiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal, "The Dance" was an important personal story that embraced modern social realities.

Not only is her husband from the Mainland, but he's military, too, a career Navy chief.

It's a source of great pride for Burbridge. When Hawaiian panels have asked her about statehood, the 39-year-old mother has raised eyebrows with that revelation.

"That's why 'The Dance' was so important to me, because I wanted to show more of a personal reaction — love or culture," she says.

It's also a response to those veiled questions about sides.

"They don't ask it directly but you have to give your opinion, and my opinion is not always the opinion that they expect," she says.

" 'The Dance,' for me, was really a way to show it is not that easy to decide those things."