In her stunning playwriting debut, Korean American actress Jeena Yi has managed to create a masterpiece. Jesa, a Ma-Yi Theater Company production now playing at the Public Theater, is an instant classic that blends elements of domestic drama (subset: fractious family reunion), ghost story, and anthropological study of the Korean tradition known as jesa. This annual gathering allows families to commemorate their dead ancestors through a combination of food, ritual bowing, and the generous pouring and consumption of the boozy, rice-based spirit soju.
One year after the death of their mother (and five years after their dad’s passing), four sisters gather at the well-curated suburban Orange County home of Grace (Shannon Tyo), the uptight second-born who struggles to maintain her facade of suburban perfection. She’s the one who skipped two grades in elementary school but now finds herself as the dutiful wife of a distant executive husband and an equally estranged 9-year-old daughter.
Her sisters are a study in contrasts: Tina (Tina Chilip, brash and feisty), the eldest, is a foul-mouthed, blunt-mannered chef whose quickness with a putdown masks a deep insecurity; she’s also a heavy drinker, like her dad. The third-born, Brenda (Christine Heesun Hwang, whose hooded eyes telegraph her tentativeness), is an aspiring actress/director/creative who fled the family drama for New York City and a career that she fears may never quite flourish; she bonded with her dad over their mutual love of movies but has maintained her distance from the rest of the family since his death. Then there’s the baby of the family, Liz (Laura Sohn), an Ivy League grad who earns more than her sisters combined in some undisclosed business venture and struggles to check her corporate assertiveness around her big sisters (even though she’s secretly lends many of them money).
Yi outlines the quartet’s tricky sisterly dynamics in small moments — the way that family members can needle each other over burnt shrimp or the choice of socks — while also dropping clues to some of bigger conflicts and revelations that are still to come. Many of the sisters’ issues stem from the parents whose lives they have supposedly gathered to commemorate — and who clearly played favorites among their girls while also tormenting all of them at various times both emotionally and physically. Instead of pursuing family therapy, though, they cling to a ritual whose details they only vaguely remember. (When they try to consult an online app on the precise form and order of the bows and blessings, they soon give up with the realization that none of them can read Korean.)
Another tradition they cling to is fighting, both verbally and (perhaps surprisingly for an all-female show) physically. You might mistake these siblings for rough-housing boys so quick are they to lunge at each other like wrestlers or fencers; there is more than one knife brandished in this one-act drama (Chelsea Pace is credited as the fight director). But the women’s animosity is liable to blow over almost as quickly as it erupts, a clear indication of how these sisters have grown accustomed to setting aside their own differences to gird themselves for the more dominant antagonists they shared in common.
Umma and Appa may be departed, but their presence lingers among their grown children. Yi dramatizes this with a chilling detour into magic realism that emerges naturally from the seance-like jesa ritual that brought the characters together. After being served their favorite foods and beverages, why shouldn’t the ancestors accept the invitation? Director Mei Ahn Teo brilliantly manages the transitions between the real and the otherworldly, making great use of Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting and Hao Bai’s otherworldly sound design on You-Shin Chen’s California-suburban-cool set.
Yi has created a quartet of memorable characters who are bonded by their upbringing with difficult parents and yet have responded to that experience in unique ways. Some have picked up habits, mostly bad, from one of their parents; others have sublimated their sense of hurt and withdrawn into anxious insecurity. When they try to open up and let their guard down, they find that their chosen language doesn’t always register. (In one funny but telling scene, Brenda compares herself to Biff, the self-deluded son of Willy Loman from The Death of a Salesman, but Tina mistakenly thinks she’s talking about the high school bully from Back to the Future.)
In this way, Yi has crafted a set of characters who feel tangibly real. You can see the hurt in Sohn’s eyes as her Liz walks in on Tina and Brenda laughing about a stray dog that bit her as a little girl; you can also see brittle determination in Tyo’s Grace as the composure she’s maintained like a veteran marathon runner begins to buckle. The first-rate cast presents a buffet of styles, from withwithrawal and denial to passive aggressiveness to outright aggression — as they work their way through one seriously fraught reunion.
One of Yi’s biggest achievements is to center women, and women only, in a family-reunion drama that both adheres to the tropes of the genre while also exploding them. She pulls off a similar revolution in her depiction of the jesa itself. “The author is aware this is a ceremony traditionally performed only by men and passed along the patriarchal line,” she writes in a footnote in the script, before adding, “She does not care.” As a writer, Yi has a welcome fearlessness. Jesa both honors tradition and liberates it — charting a bold, bracing, and deeply human path for theater. You’ll be tempted to pour out a cup of soju and make a celebratory toast. ★★★★★
JESA
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 12 for $80