Suicide Forest NYC Reviews and Tickets

72%

(23 Ratings)

Positive

69%

Mixed

22%

Negative

Members say

Ambitious, Confusing, Edgy, Indulgent, Thought-provoking

About the Show

Ma-Yi presents an encore staging of "Suicide Forest," a bilingual nightmare play excavating the Japanese-American consciousness and its looming relationship with sex, suicide, and identity.

In 1990’s Japan, a teenage girl grapples with her sexuality in a nightmarish, male-defined society as a salaryman desperately tries to escape his masochistic psyche. Both are clawing for their self-worth. When their two journeys collide, they expose their darkest desires fueled by shame as they now confront life and death with the notorious Suicide Forest looming over their imagination. Performed by a Japanese heritage cast, "Suicide Forest" examines the role of community and the inner struggles of emotional, psychic and social suicide through the playwright’s lived stories and inner landscape.

Show-Score Member Reviews (23)

Crazy good, Ambitious, Exquisite, Absorbing

See it if you want your theater to transport you to places you've never been, and to make you consider things you've never had to consider before.

Don't see it if You're looking for safe, linear theater. Read more

Affecting, Unique, Hybrid, Mesmerizing, Rare

See it if you’d like to see the work of a playwright-performer who is mining her own totally unique segment of human consciousness.

Don't see it if you’re looking for a contemporary equivalent of the well-made play. Read more

Great writing, Great staging, Absorbing

See it if Run to see this play. Each time I thought the playwright had reached the end, she added a novel, engrossing twist.

Don't see it if Alienating, distancing in the best possible way.

Intense, Absorbing, Edgy, Riveting, Thought-provoking

See it if Unflinching look @ culture-specific problems re status, sex, conditions of social acceptance. Nightmarish dread of options closed one by one

Don't see it if expect Lee to write about Japan (or US) w/ reverential, rose-colored yearning; think minorities write for the majority rather than their own Read more

Shocking, Confusing, Disturbing, Surreal, Intense

See it if Weird vignettes with a humiliated businessman, meek underage mistress & vicious daughters. Then a 4th-wall breaking search for identity.

Don't see it if You don’t like surrealism. Eventually it all makes sense. Many painful moments. Themes of sexual abuse & suicide. Sex and more sex.

Compelling, Intelligent, Masterful, Thought-provoking

See it if You haven't yet seen Kristine Haruna Lee. You seek the deeply Japanese, mysterious, and nightmarish in your viewing.

Don't see it if You want a firm sense of what is going on, a grounding in Western culture, and no strange sexual stuff happening, i.e. you avoid the other.

Thought-provoking, Intelligent, Great acting, Great staging, Ambitious

See it if You love theater that challenges you. Show explores Japanese culture from a Japanese-American POV, hitting all the cultural highlights

Don't see it if You’re triggered by the title. No one commits suicide in the show. but suicide is referenced. Also if you only like trad stories/ messages. Read more

Fantasy, Indulgent, Great staging, Experimental, Insecure

See it if Gay writer searches via high schoolgirl's sexuality to break from ancient-world pain of her "ghost mama" as in "I don't know where I belong"

Don't see it if The direct-address resolve with real writer and her mum compensates for:"Tastes like Mommy/Things schoolgirls will do for Gucci handbags." Read more

Critic Reviews (7)

4/5 Stars. "It's a raw, provocative and eviscerating exploration of the artist's own identity, wrapped in the bubble-gum-pink and pastel hues of Tokyo export Hello Kitty."
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"That’s Really Mom Up There: 'Suicide Forest' and 'SKiNFoLK'"
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"'Suicide Forest' is a fantasy on themes of identity in three movements. It is, by turns, brilliant, baffling, and highly self-indulgent…It's a head-scratcher, an original, an irritant. With this one, you're on your own."
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"This illustrates the biggest problem with 'Suicide Forest': it takes on too many issues, jumping from social to sexual to mythological to intimate family subjects. Making the play even more difficult to understand is that it is performed in both Japanese and English."
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Score: 90%. "For 'Suicide Forest's' frightening scope and ambition, it works because of its masterful creative shepherding. The depth of Lee's collaboration with Ogawa has effectively teased out many of the beats in Lee's script that make it so original."
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For a previous production

"When the fourth wall breaks, this nightmare-vision play about Japanese-American identity cracks wide open, and what’s underneath is so heart-stingingly tender and explicitly personal that the whole work shifts...Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has directed a wild ride of a production...For a haunted daughter, this play is an exorcism. But it is also an embrace."
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For a previous production

"Simultaneously confounding and thrilling...Lee's sudden swerve toward introspective navel-gazing is a double-edged sword: As touching as it is...it does also leech away the more beguiling sense of mystery the play had heretofore built up...Even if not all of Lee's formal and emotional gambits work, enough of them connect to make 'Suicide Forest' an invigoratingly risky, genuinely thought-provoking experience, one worth seeing no matter your linguistic and cultural background."
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Trailer

Creative team

Ma-Yi Theater Company