If there is a means to cover Kristine Haruna Lee's vivid, haunted "Suicide Woodland" without pointing out the ending, I do not understand what it is. Because when the 4th wall breaks, this nightmare-vision play regarding Japanese-American identity splits broad open, and also what's beneath is so heart-stingingly tender and also explicitly personal that the entire work shifts.

Below, then, is an emphatic piece of advice: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has actually directed a wild flight of a manufacturing. And below is a caution: looters dead in advance.

The first figure we see in "Self-destruction Forest," relocating slowly 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, seeds lowes this is Mad Mad. Her visibility stalks this play.

Ms. Lee is likewise an actor in it, representing a teen Japanese schoolgirl named Azusa. Deep in the performance, after the vibrant pink-and-white inside of Jian Jung's collection has actually offered means to the creepy abstractness of the woods, Ms. Lee drops the mask of her role. She becomes, disarmingly, her Seattle-raised self, talking directly to the target market, taking possession of the concerns of heritage that fuel her play.

" I wish to confess," she states, "I grew up with a mom who I can never ever fully connect with. Language obstacle." Her mother, she clarifies, is "100 percent Japanese."

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

Provided with Ma-Yi Theater Firm, "Self-destruction Forest" is a tussle between those parts of her. You can really feel Ms. Lee standing up to any type of sort of conformity.

Performed mostly in English with some supertitled Japanese, the play is made up of brief, sharp vignettes set in 1990s Tokyo and in a forest like the notorious Aokigahara, where lots of people have gone to kill themselves.

Ms. Lee leans hard and also purposely right into stereotypes, flowers names her central figures variations of stock characters: a salaryman (Eddy Toru Ohno) in his 60s tempted by self-destruction, and the plaid-skirted Azusa (costumes are by Alice garden view hotel london Tavener), who is preyed on by the salaryman. His own adolescent children (Akiko Aizawa as well as Dawn Akemi Saito), with pigtailed hair in cotton-candy shades, are alarming symptoms of womanhood, at the same time hypersexualized and infantilized.

Spectators without any Japanese heritage could not recognize quite what to make of it, at the very least not up until Ms. Lee breaks that fourth wall.

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

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

As she asks her mommy inquiries in English, as well as translates the responses that the older Ms. Lee speaks in Japanese, the beautifully conflicted intricacy of "Suicide Forest" is movingly on screen.

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