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In the theater, youre safe assuming that everything is a lie.
Theatrical mechanisms glide when theyve been oiled with falsehood: Its what the machine was designed for.
But what happens when you get something real in the gears?
Two pieces opening this week stop the fiction-machine mid-flow with a jerk.
In their case, smoothness would be the lie.
Suicide Forestbegins with a visitation.
Pendulous bags hang at various heights from the ceiling like exaggerated teardrops, swinging, somehow viscous.
Haruna Lee is playing a frightening comic game with Salaryman.
Coughing and choking, Azusa wakes from her awful stupor and starts to demand things and develop desires too.
At this point, Lee literally goes out the window.
Azusa finds a portal behind the mirror and flees through it, and the show breaks.
Lee asks the ghost questions in loving Japanese Aoi Lee is, in actual fact, their mother.
A second time, for instance, you see the choreography of seemingly candid moments.
But honesty from a stage isnt onlyhonesty its been thickened and complicated by having been made into performance.
Haruna Lee delivers a dense truth, a thick truth.
The theater at the Bushwick Starr has been changed into an underground juke joint literallyunderground.
SKiNFoLKis also about roots of the other sort.
The best moments were unscripted breaks, in which Walkers actual charisma showed suddenly bright.
For instance, the night I saw it, there was a little microphone snafu.
Walker stopped the show and called down the appropriate person to fix it.
She looked out at us while we waited.
Everybody doing all right?
She was easy in command, casually powerful.
How did the actual living woman feel about her granddaughter putting words in her mouth?
Suddenly,SKiNFoLKhad skin in the game.
In our oversharing, constantly documented age, mere autofiction doesnt seem brave.
Youre talking about your first masturbation experience, as Haruna Lee does?
You note the oppressive whiteness of your grandmothers faith?
But facing your mother or grandma while you say those things feels truly transgressive and thrilling.
So if you want to find the theater with the keenest cutting edge, check the cast list.
Look for a mother.Cherchez la femme.
