If there is a means to discuss Kristine Haruna Lee's dazzling, haunted "Suicide Woodland" without mentioning the ending, I don't know what it is. Because when the fourth wall surface breaks, this nightmare-vision play concerning Japanese-American identification splits vast open, and what's beneath is so heart-stingingly tender and explicitly individual that the entire work shifts.

Here, after that, is an emphatic item of suggestions: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has actually routed a wild trip of a production. And below is a caution: spoilers dead ahead.

The very first number we see in "Self-destruction Woodland," moving gradually around the edge of the proscenium, is a god in scarlet silk. White-faced and raven-haired, with soft red pigment at the corners of her eyes, this seethes Mad. Her visibility stalks this play.

Ms. Lee is also an actor in it, depicting an adolescent Japanese schoolgirl named Azusa. But deep in the efficiency, after the vivid pink-and-white interior of Jian Jung's collection has given way to the spooky abstractness of the woods, Ms. Lee drops the mask of her role. She comes to be, disarmingly, her Seattle-raised self, talking directly to the target market, taking ownership of the problems of heritage that gas her play.

" I want to confess," she claims, "I grew up with a mother who I can never ever Click for more info fully interact with. Language barrier." Her mommy, she clarifies, is "one hundred percent Japanese."

" So I presume that technically makes me 50 percent Japanese," Ms. Lee includes. Often I feel like I'm only 33 percent?

Presented with Ma-Yi Cinema Firm, "Self-destruction Woodland" is a tussle between those components of her. You can feel Ms. Lee resisting any kind of type of consistency.

Done mainly in English with some supertitled Japanese, the play is made up of short, sharp vignettes embeded in 1990s Tokyo and in a forest like the well known Aokigahara, where many individuals have mosted likely to kill themselves.

Ms. Lee leans difficult and deliberately right into stereotypes, her main numbers variations of supply personalities: a salaryman (Swirl Toru Ohno) in his 60s lured by self-destruction, and also the plaid-skirted Azusa (costumes are by Alice Tavener), that is taken advantage of by the salaryman. His very own teen little girls (Akiko Aizawa and also Dawn Akemi Saito), with pigtailed hair in cotton-candy shades, are alarming symptoms of womanhood, simultaneously hypersexualized and infantilized.

Viewers without any Japanese heritage could not know fairly what to construct from it, at least not until Ms. Lee breaks that fourth wall.

Extremely close to the end, another actor joins her onstage: Aoi Lee, who plays Mad Mad.

" This is my mother," the playwright tells us, protectively. "She dances Butoh."

As she asks her mommy inquiries in English, and also equates the solutions that the senior Ms. Lee talks in Japanese, the beautifully conflicted complexity of "Suicide Forest" is movingly on screen.

For a haunted daughter, this play is an exorcism. Yet it is additionally an accept.