The living doll, Azusa (Haruna Lee, center), adored by sisters Miho (Ako, left) and Chiho (Dawn Akemi Saito) in Lee’s Suicide Forest.
The challenges are as great as the rewards in Haruna Lee’s Suicide Forest, a tortured, weird, and very personal fantasy that includes passages spoken in Japanese, bouts of simulated schoolgirl molestation, and a lengthy scene in near darkness with characters dressed as goats and wearing headlamps. But those willing to go along on this guilt trip, skillfully guided by director Aya Ogawa, will find unexpectedly beautiful moments of theatricality and an ending that pivots from madness to reality with the force of an emergency brake being thrown on a speeding train.
The play’s title refers to Japan’s Sea of Trees, a forest known for the numerous suicides that have occurred there. But before Lee moves the action to that haunted ground, there are other demons and spirits to be considered. The night begins with a pas de deux between a god named Mad Mad (Aoi Lee, not coincidentally the playwright’s mother) and a stretched-out tube of fabric stuffed with something round and heavy. This image, an orb inside a dangling rope, haunts the production. It is painted into the set design and batches of them eventually dangle from above. Symbolically, they could be bodiless heads in a noose and/or a stylized female sex organ.
From that spooky beginning, the action shifts to find Salaryman (Eddy Toru Ohno) and his friend (Keizo Kaji) in a cryptic conversation full of foreshadowing and mythology.
Salaryman (Ohno) seeks comfort from Azusa (Lee). Photographs by Richard Termine.
Friend: There’s that old story. You know the one? About a woman who lived in the forest. She shepherds the weak towards their death.... She’s one of those—you know. A family left grandma in the forest to die. But then she didn’t die.
But before their chat can turn too absurdist, the scene shifts yet again: now Salaryman is in his work cubicle and Office Lady (Yuki Kawahisa) informs him of an upcoming appointment. Then, in something of a cross between a man’s workplace submission fantasy and a woman’s declaration of the power of her sexuality, Office Lady, who entered slump-shouldered and submissive, transforms into a naughty dominatrix who brings Salaryman to his knees, with him gleefully declaring, “You own my imagination!”
That appointment turns out to be with Salaryman’s two daughters Miho (Ako) and Chiho (Dawn Akemi Saito), high school girls portrayed by older women dressed in 1980s fashions. (The script provides handy cultural footnotes on such matters, although audience members, left to their own devices, might think of these girls as the answer to the question: What ever happened to Baby Jane?). Also in tow is a life-sized doll named Azusa, embodied by the playwright and dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform. Once the girls have collected their allowance, Azusa is left alone with Salaryman, and he engages the lifeless body in a bit of fetishism that ultimately brings the doll painfully to life and into confrontation with Mad Mad.
Momentarily catching its breath, the play relaxes into a karaoke bar scene with Salaryman and Friend griping over the modern-day ills of sexual harassment in the workplace and a general lack of machismo among today’s younger men. Salaryman breaks out in song with a ballad celebrating his working-stiff lifestyle:
At least I’m not him
The guy with the virtual girlfriend
In a small phone machine.
Salaryman (Eddy Toru Ohno) and Friend (Keizo Kaji) wonder over golf and suicide.
Meanwhile, Miho and Chiho are out on the town with the newly animated Azusa, but they tear into her with a “mean girl” ferocity, and before long Azusa finds herself in the arms of Salaryman at a “love hotel,” where, in exchange for a Gucci handbag, he expects from her something between sexual congress and a suicide pact. Suffice it to say that it ends violently and drives the play into yet another crazy shift, a prank game show where celebrities spy on Salaryman. Performed in Japanese, with some subtitling, and with Salaryman’s boss, Ken (Saito), adorned in a large goat mask, Salaryman is humiliated and called out as an “old man baby.”
Death, then, comes as a relief when Azusa, channeling her inner Alice Through the Looking Glass, climbs through a window and into the forest deep, where a clan of goats prattles on about their own sad condition. And just when you begin to wish that these goats would end up in a stew, something remarkable happens. As if being stirred from a nightmare, the house lights come up, and a startling self-confession ensues from the actors. The transition is so life-affirming that Mad Mad, offering a concluding invitation to the afterworld, never stands a chance.
Suicide Forest, presented by The Bushwick Starr in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company plays through March 15 at A.R.T./New York Theatres (502 West 53rd St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and at 5 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information, visit ma-yitheatre.org.
