“SUICIDE FOREST is superb... They took their existentially terrifying play into kindness, community, and shared burden, moving the piece out of the forest and into the light.”

“Two of the best live performances in New York right now, Aoi Lee and Haruna Lee in Haruna’s “Suicide Forest”... Aoi and Haruna onstage together for the first time radiated with the impossibility of the spirit and mortal worlds touching. If every dead person is like a parent, maybe some parents are also like ghosts, haunting us with the possibility of a closeness we’ll never be able to make flesh.”

“ I am still tingling. You and Aya both have done such incredible warrior work here. Especially you and your body. It is otherworldly and shamanic what is possible for you to bring to the stage, and to ride the spirits every night is quite a labor. A beautiful and troubling and necessary one... There is so much to exchange. You are stardust. Thank you for holding this work/role with such grace, care, and rigor. The spell is cast.”

“The genius and courage of Kristine Haruna Lee and the entire team of SUICIDE FOREST at the Bushwick Starr (aka TEMPLE OF REVOLUTION) is NOT to be underestimated and refuses to be dismissed. It rises up with such ferocity, this exorcism... I will never forget this.

Anytime a white American reviewer steps to our work, I brace myself - hoping that they know how to deal with the gaps in their knowledge and they won’t just dismiss us. While [The New York Times] doesn’t, and we both came to “exorcism”, there’s a clear gap in how [NYT] understood how to process this. This wasn’t made for the white gaze. This is not only from the “Asian American as minority” standpoint. In the psyche of Kristine exists a complex “Japan” that manifests in spiraling nightmares of shame and humiliation that is all of our blood. It is nightmare upon nightmare that crack open the reality of sleepwalking through life. Wild and demented, yet utterly precise, Suicide Forest spoke to me in metaphors that I’m remembering from archival and ancient grief.

Spoiler alert. This is the moment today that I’m turning over and over again. The salaryman kills the schoolgirl when she rejects him. He strangles her, her body falls lifeless onto the furniture. And then his nightmare begins - a show specifically capturing humiliation features him getting fired by the CEO (in an animal mask head). He begs. Puts on a diaper. Prostrates himself to save his job. Manic Laughter from show hosts. Cruel and callous. And yet somehow, the schoolgirl, having been masturbated to like a blow up doll, having been killed by him, is now awake - alive - moving inside this like a ghost. A ghost that is awake, alive, watching the proceedings without a trace of glee or satisfaction, but yes, compassion. There is no hunger for revenge, which to me, in this culture, is an extraordinary relief. “All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”- Dhammapada”