A reviewer never walks out on a show before it’s over, no matter how bad it is. However, when six members of the cast of Kumu Kahua’s production of "Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre," playing six of the nastiest, most foulmouthed women you’d never want to meet, left the stage and began screaming at individuals in the audience at Thursday’s performance, I almost broke the rule.

The perpetrators of this appalling adaptation of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s controversial first book are not named in the playbill. They should be, if only to ensure that innocent parties are not held responsible for it.

Director Harry Wong III constructs the story around a 12-year-old girl named Lucy who lives in a rural area of the Big Island in the 1970s. Lucy’s life is a living hell.

Her mother calls her a "slut," subjects her to incessant verbal abuse and beats her with wooden hangers, a golf club — whatever is at hand. Her sisters are as treacherous and nasty as their mother.

As if that’s not torment enough, Lucy is bullied unmercifully at school by a pack of vicious girls.

Yes, insult humor can be entertaining when the characters are on a equal footing and the barbs fly in all directions. Watching a defenseless person being brutalized over and over again isn’t entertaining; it’s repugnant.

Elexis Draine (Lucy) dominates the show visually. Her expressive eyes light up the rare scenes when Lucy encounters a bit of kindness or humane treatment. She eventually responds to the abuse by cutting her arm to watch the blood drip. She moves on to charging men $20 to look at her bare breasts (or maybe Draine is playing another girl in the scene where she turns her back to the audience and pretends to uncover her chest; she plays three characters with nary a costume adjustment to differentiate them).

Director Wong mixes things up at times by having a male character deliver some of a female character’s lines. Almost all the characters express themselves in a gutter pidgin and ethnic slurs. Obscenities and shocking one-liners can be powerful punch lines, but when almost everyone spews foul language like a broken sewer main, the impact is lost. That is the situation here.

This toxic waste dump of a play — part tragedy, part sick comedy — benefits from the talents of Alvin Chan, Shawn Anthony Thomsen and Friston Ho‘o­kano. Chan plays a collection of eight distinct characters that include a porn film star, someone’s alcoholic uncle, a rooster and one of Lucy’s $20 voyeurs. Thomsen’s list of quirky characters includes a kindly taxidermist, a dog, a goat and a stereotypical "boys will be girls" female kumu hula.

Ho‘okano (hair and makeup design) does a masterful job disguising Chan, Thomsen and the women with an eclectic collection of vintage wigs.