If there is a way to write about Kristine Haruna Lee’s vivid, haunted “Suicide Forest” without mentioning the ending, I don’t know what it is. Because 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.

Here, then, is an emphatic piece of advice: Go see it at the Bushwick Starr, where Aya Ogawa has directed a wild ride of a production. And here is a warning: spoilers dead ahead.

The first figure we see in “Suicide Forest,” moving slowly around the edge of the proscenium, is a god in scarlet silk. White-faced and raven-haired, with soft red pigment at the corners of her eyes, this is Mad Mad. Her presence stalks this play.

Ms. Lee is also an actor in it, portraying a teenage Japanese schoolgirl named Azusa. But deep in the performance, after the vibrant pink-and-white interior of Jian Jung’s set has given way to the eerie abstractness of the woods, Ms. Lee drops the mask of her role. She becomes, disarmingly, her Seattle-raised self, speaking directly to the audience, taking ownership of the issues of heritage that fuel her play.