The big challenge in the Leeward Community College production of "The Duchess" is to make the norms and conventions of a 400-year-old play accessible to a modern audience. LCC director Paul Cravath and his student casts have never shied away from big challenges, and they take this one on with plenty of emotional energy.

John Webster's original early-17th-century "The Duchess of Malfi" centers on a widow of royal blood who secretly marries beneath her, producing children who are considered bastards and incurring the anger of two brothers who denounce her as a whore.

Following hard on the traditions of Elizabethan drama, which most audiences know through the works of Shakespeare, the play's characters and plot are not developed in the modern sense. Characters may be simply inserted to make a point, and story lines don't always easily flow.

That many of Shakespeare's plays continue to speak to contemporary minds is a function of his instinctive genius, but even some of the Bard's best characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, act erratically. So a modern production of a play from this era must look for ways to create a subtext to support the written words.

Cravath chose Phillip Bullington's updated version of the script, which sets the action somewhere in the future.

Although some of its archaic elements may be a bit cleaned up, the production still seems firmly anchored in 1610. As a result, the audience must work harder than it wants to reach these characters.

Part of that effort is a result of Sara Whitehead's inky lighting, which submerges the action in subterranean gloom. The set is a heap of monolithic stone blocks and the "future" costumes are an undefinable mix of knee-pants, cocktail wear and wrestling garb.

As in most period plays, we spend a good deal of time up front identifying who these people are and what they are engaged in.

Unfortunately, the title character is never presented with the power that should accompany her rank. Brooke Jones is so weighted down with mourning veils that we see her only as an animated mass of black material. Jones primarily projects grief — more in response to her brothers' scorn than the death of her husband (about whom the play tells us nothing.)

The brothers — Bryan Repsholdt as Ferdinand and Ryan Sutherlan as the Cardinal — berate her for failing in her duty to make a royal marriage and regard her attachment to her secretary, Antonio (Jared Paakaula), as sinful self-indulgence.

Curiously, it is two years and three children later before Ferdinand acts. He imprisons the Duchess, surrounds her with madmen and eventually orders her to be strangled. Thereafter, murderous retribution takes over and bodies pile up satisfyingly for the final scene.

The Duchess remains pathetically reactive. Ferdinand has an interesting mad scene in which he behaves like a dog. And we never get a character fix on Antonio or the Cardinal.

Interestingly, some modern sense of character development comes from an actor known as JEDI in the role of hired assassin, who eventually begins to question his participation in the string of cruel deeds.

"The Duchess" carries a heavy load that is often too much for us to get our arms around.