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FAMILY MATTERS: A mother
and daughter will act out their
cross-cultural relationship while
portraying characters in a new
bilingual nightmare play, “Suicide
Forest,” debuting at the Bushwick
Starr on Feb. 27. Sasha Arutyunova
Dance with death
New play steps into some dark woods
COURIER LIFE, F 24-7 EB. 15-21, 2019 53
By Julianne Cuba This show has deep roots.
A mother and daughter will
act out their sometimes strained
cross-cultural relationship, while portraying
characters in a new bilingual
nightmare play, “Suicide Forest,”
debuting at the Bushwick Starr on Feb.
27, according to the show’s Japanese-
American playwright.
“The play kind of takes a sharp turn
where it really becomes this revelation
of a mother-daughter relationship,”
said Kristine Haruna Lee, who lives
in Sunset Park. “I use the space of the
play to talk about a mother-daughter
relationship that’s had a lot of obstacles
and language barriers, culture barriers,
and what it means for us to be carrying
this intergenerational pain.”
Lee and her mother, who is a traditional
Japanese Butoh dancer, explored
their language barrier in the 2016 dance
piece “Communing with You.” In the
new 90-minute play, they join a cast of
seven to tell the story of two people —
a high school girl and a middle-aged
salaryman — each trying to navigate a
nightmarish world.
The show takes place in Suicide
Forest, an actual forest at the foot of
Ft. Fuji that is famous as a spot where
people go to kill themselves. Lee plays
a high-school girl trying to escape a
strictly conformist society, who travels
into the woods and meets a supernatural
woman, played by her mother, who
invites people to their deaths.
“In my play, we meet these goats
who are living there and there’s also a
woman who is hurting these goats and
she is a kind of goddess that ushers
people towards their death, called the
shinigami,” said Lee.
Lee said that she was inspired
to explore her own background
and identity on stage after reading
the 1964 Adrienne Kennedy play
“Funnyhouse of a Negro.”
“I was really struck by Kennedy’s
ability to write a play from her kind
of dark psychic landscape, the very
inner vulnerable space, so I set out to
write a place with that same intention,”
she said. “I would say the nightmare
is really pointing to this dark psychic
space, the play itself is digging into
my Japanese and Japanese-American
identity.”
“Suicide Forest” at the Bushwick
Starr (207 Starr St. between Irving and
Wyckoff avenues in Bushwick, www.
thebushwickstarr.org). Feb. 27–March
16, Wed–Sat at 8 pm. $25.
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