"When the Cassowary Pooped" opens the current theater season for the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. And try to find a third-grader who wouldn't be intrigued by the title of this new children's play, written and directed by Tamara Montgomery.

You may not know that the cassowary is a large flightless bird native to the tropical forests of New Guinea and Australia, smaller but gaudier than the ostrich and emu. But you will be fascinated by its puppet version designed for the production by Chesley Cannon and propelled by D'Neka Patten.

When the lighting is just right and the puppet is backed up by a black drape, the illusion is complete and the effect is startlingly real. Even when we see the puppeteer inside the bird apparatus, we concentrate on the animal and not the human.

In Montgomery's play — based on her children's book of the same title — the cassowary is especially good at two things: eating and ... well ... pooping. Both of those activities are represented with enthusiastic relish on stage as great mounds of bird doo-doo are closely examined by other rainforest creatures for their color, texture and odor.

The birdie bombs, however, have a special feature — they immediately sprout giant trees that fill the blighted rainforest in the same way that Jack's beanstalk transformed his backyard.

All that fun aside, the rest of Montgomery's play is not up to her usual standard.

There is an interesting collection of rainforest creatures for which costumer Sandra Finney sews up bat wings and beetle brows — although her kangaroo looks altogether too much like Da Mean Mongoose she created for another Kennedy Theatre production.

Joe Dodd designs the rainforest and David Griffith lights it with a rainbow, but the story line — when you take out the pooping and the sprouting — is a jumble of dashing about in a muddled attempt to keep the humans and their saws from demolishing the habitat and capturing the cassowary.

There's also a Story Reader (Tony Young) who speaks moderately thick Hawaiian pidgin and finds himself inexplicably knee-deep in New Guinea.

Well, it is colorful and animated and it has a politically correct green message. So that ought to be enough to overcome anyone's scatological anxiety and allow them to appreciate cassowary excrement.