If there is a way to write about Kristine Haruna Lee's dazzling, haunted "Suicide Forest" without stating the ending, I don't understand what it is. Since when the fourth wall surface breaks, this nightmare-vision play regarding Japanese-American identification splits wide open, and also what's underneath is so heart-stingingly tender as well as clearly individual that the entire work changes.

Right here, then, is an emphatic piece of advice: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has routed a wild ride of a manufacturing. And also right here is a caution: spoilers dead in advance.

The very first figure we see in "Self-destruction Forest," relocating gradually around the edge of the proscenium, is a god in scarlet silk. White-faced as well as raven-haired, with soft red pigment at the corners of her eyes, this seethes Mad. Her presence stalks this play.

Ms. Lee is likewise a star in it, representing an adolescent Japanese schoolgirl called Azusa. Deep in the performance, after the vivid pink-and-white interior of Jian Jung's collection has actually offered method to the eerie abstractness of the woods, Ms. Lee goes down the mask of her function. She becomes, disarmingly, her Seattle-raised self, speaking directly to the audience, taking possession of the issues of heritage that gas her play.

" I intend to admit," she says, "I matured with a mother that I can never completely connect with. Language obstacle." Her mother, she clarifies, is "100 percent Japanese."

" So I guess that practically makes me 50 percent Japanese," Ms. Lee includes. "But that percent is a lie. In some cases I seem like I'm only 33 percent? Various other times, as high as 70 percent. I am additionally, generally, a high percentage of American also."

Provided with Ma-Yi Theater Company, "Suicide Woodland" is a tussle between those parts of her. You can feel Ms. Lee withstanding any type of type of consistency.

Performed primarily in English with some supertitled Japanese, the play is comprised of brief, sharp vignettes set in 1990s Tokyo and also in a woodland like the well known Aokigahara, where many people have actually gone to kill themselves.

Ms. Lee leans tough and purposely into stereotypes, her main figures versions of supply characters: a salaryman (Swirl Toru Ohno) in his 60s lured by suicide, and also the plaid-skirted Azusa (outfits are by Alice Tavener), flowers and bees who is victimized by the salaryman. His very own teen little girls (Akiko Aizawa and Dawn Akemi Saito), with pigtailed hair in cotton-candy shades, are startling indications of femininity, simultaneously hypersexualized and also infantilized.

Spectators with no Japanese heritage may not know quite what to construct from it, at least not till Ms. Lee breaks that fourth wall surface.

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

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

As she asks her mother questions in English, as well as converts the answers that the senior Ms. Lee speaks in Japanese, the beautifully conflicted intricacy of "Suicide Woodland" is movingly on display.

For a haunted child, this play is an exorcism. It is likewise a welcome.