Off-Broadway Review: Ma-Yi Theater Company presents The Bushwick Starr Production of “Suicide Forest”
Natalie Rine, Associate New York Critic
Haruna Lee’s “Suicide Forest” is not for the faint of heart. A semi-biographical tale so visceral it punctures any preconceived notions of immigration stories on the American stage, the nightmare play spirals precipitously through personal, communal, and intergenerational trauma to explore themes of emotional, psychic and social suicide seen through the eyes of one teenage girl and one desperate businessman in 1990s Japan. Performed by a Japanese heritage cast and originally presented by The Bushwick Starr in association with Ma-Yi and directed by Aya Ogawa, “Suicide Forest” is a bilingual phantasmagoria that excavates the Japanese-American consciousness and its intimate relationship with sex, suicide, and identity through a simultaneously witty and horrifying juxtaposition of time and space jumps that proves Haruna Lee to be a writer and performer unparalleled on stage today.
To experience “Suicide Forest” is to allow Lee to open a deep crevasse in your soul and unafraid, go spelunking. The teenage girl (Haruna Lee) grapples with their sexuality in a male-defined society as a salaryman desperately tries to escape his masochistic psyche. Both are clawing for their self-worth, but when their stories intertwine, they must confront life and death with the notorious, legendary Suicide Forest looming over their imagination. Where Lee’s writing excels is in their non-linear juxtaposition of book scenes with what can only be described as dream sequences; jumping from “real life” scenarios to out-of-body experiences, Lee goes from being the center of a sexual, societal hurricane trying to mold and abuse her, to dissociating into witnessing a prank gameshow, others’ lives and deaths, and eventually a miraculous herd of animals attempting communication and communion with her in the forest. Beyond the play’s initial visceral shock value of disturbing images and dialogue, “Suicide Forest” transforms into a masterclass of written traumatic expression through which we journey with Lee to attempt making sense of and finding closure for their dissociations and repressions on a personal and cultural level.
Basic repression is universal, necessary, and inescapable. It is what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being; it is bound up with the ability to accept the postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self-control, and of our recognition of and consideration for other people. Surplus repression, on the other hand, is specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture. In terms of our own culture, then: basic repression makes us distinctively human, capable of directing our own lives and co-existing with others; surplus repression makes us into monogamous heterosexual patriarchal slaves to our surroundings. Anything outside of this historical “norm,” is unfortunately still struggled against and declared to be revolutionary, and in “Suicide Forest,” we get the opportunity to see this struggle through both of our protagonists’ points of view.
The struggle for liberation from repressed sexualities, identities, and societal labels alienates them in different ways, however. Whereas the businessman’s life is ultimately his own to take, when confronted with similar feelings of shame and confusion, the girl can merely imitate the act of suicide; we see them try to jump and escape out the window, but instead of finding absolution, they find themself in the fantastical Suicide Forest, still forced to reckon with their reflection and repressions—no escape! It is here where the play shifts tones and realities in a 180. Removed from time and space, a herd of goat-like creatures fascinatingly challenge a language and cultural barrier the girl feels as they are now separate from who they were before the window jump, having to make new connections and relationships in a foreign land, an immigrant to imagination. Here they confront their ghost-like mother and ancestral Japanese herd, explicitly symbolizing a disconnect between generational understandings of one another as the girl gets further and further from “home” (in this case, meaning before the liminality of their window passthrough forces them to grow up in a sense). It is in this fantastical setting where there is a surprise twist fourth-wall encroachment, where the Mother’s parasitic presence latches onto Lee as the playwright trying to make sense of and escape a forest of cultural and familial expectations and shame. If one can’t see through the dark forest of their mind though, if a language isn’t there to express generational trauma passed from mother to child, if the weight of Otherness has raped you and left you for dead in your own self-understanding and identity, perhaps this cathartic art form is the only escape, as Lee steps out as the playwright to question their own understandings of self and transformation, along with the those of the cast and audience collectively.
There are two related caveats to my attempted interpretation of “Suicide Forest” though: historical approach and the concept of Otherness. That this play’s initial time period— the beginning of economic turmoil and recession in Japan resulting in such devastation it would come to be known as the Lost Decade—has been neglected on stage heretofore seems in itself to indicate a mechanics of repression at work that one review is incapable of covering comprehensively. We in America are fast to devour the latest Nintendo, anime, or kawaii cultural exports these days, which can, in fact, take the form of the same infantilization and fetishization examined by Lee in the opening scenes; animated and “cute” designs are hardly thought of to be “mature,” “sophisticated,” or “adult” cultural commodities regardless of how monetarily successful they are, which is difficult proof of a continuous imperialist mindset Lee’s character struggles with fitting into even as they chase consumer goods for material signs of wealth and sexual desirability. But when examined, this cross-cultural obsession (especially when told through a lens of immigration and personal revelations in this case) reveals a self-conscious attempt to deal with a complex multi-generational struggle of autonomy versus sovereignty, as seen through the horror play concept of Otherness.
The horror/nightmare play genre poignantly expresses Lee’s sense of powerlessness and anxiety that correlates with times of depression, confusion, and strife on a national and personal level. It is logical and probable that viewing this play under capitalism, all the human relations in it—whether secretarial to boss, sister to sister, friend to friend, or elder to subordinate—are characterized by power, dominance, passiveness, and manipulation. The horror genre expertly exacerbates this through the point of view shifts Lee experiences while dissociating, forcing us to recognize and accept the Other’s autonomy and right to exist through the absurdity of situations and exaggerated dialogue (the Other here defined as whoever is in opposition to the girl, unless it is them being Othered in which case it is reversed).
We see Lee’s mind throughout the dissociations as an interpretation of events woven with the frantic mania of trauma. While I expected to see a clash of cultures examined in this self-described “examination of Japanese and Asian American identity,” the play’s writing is so much more explicitly personal than expected while simultaneously terrifying us with the commonalities of finding “womanhood” and sexual expression in a modern world. Set design by Jian Jung captures this prevailing theme perfectly with white sacks dripping from the ceiling, looking simultaneously like ejaculation and, when lit and displayed on and along the blood-red walls, like period blood or perhaps many uvulas; this expertly reflects Lee’s character having no voice originally, while also mirroring the womxn conundrum of being simultaneously the source of life while being robbed of their own.
It is in this universality of presenting Otherness, this ability to vacillate between time and points of views to draw larger questions and themes on the personal and provocative, that Lee strikes gold. While the supporting characters of the flustered businessman or manipulative, abusive friends provoke a horrific sympathy for Lee’s schoolgirl character, the real perversion occurs not through their literal physical abuse but through the mental abuse in the switch of “acts” that takes the horrors of a perverted reality deeper to the mythical Suicide Forest. It is not the physical acts of torture, nor the acerbic dialogue that scares in Lee’s nightmare, but the supposition that at the end of everything, we all have our own Suicide Forest of personal, communal, and intergenerational identity and repression to contend with.
“Suicide Forest” by Haruna Lee
“Suicide Forest” By Haruna Lee is directed by Aya Ogawa. The cast includes Haruna Lee, Aoi Lee, along with Ako, Keizo Kaji, Yuki Kawahisa, Eddy Toru Ohno, and Dawn Akemi Saito. The creative team includes Jian Jung (scenic design), Alice Tavener (costume design), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (lighting & video design) Fan Zhang (sound design), Jen Goma (original music), and Nina Williams-Teramachi (production stage manager).
Performances of “Suicide Forest” take place February 25–March 21 at A.R.T./New York Theatres Mezzanine Theatre located at 502 West 53rd Street, Manhattan. Tickets, priced at $30–$75, can be purchased by visiting ma-yitheatre.org or by calling OvationTix at 866-811-4111.
Photo Credit: Maria Baranova