NEW YORK, NY.- Korean fairy tales can trend macabre; a few skew more grisly than even the Brothers Grimm. In the Korean version of “Cinderella,” for instance, Cinderella dies. (For a while, anyway.) Murder, starvation and sacrifice form the dark heart of this folk tradition, at least in the tales that Daniel K. Isaac tells in “Once Upon a (korean) Time,” a production from Ma-Yi Theater Company that opened Wednesday at La MaMa.

Isaac is better known as a stage and screen actor (“The Chinese Lady,” “Billions”); this is his first produced play. And if the ambition of this drama, which spans nearly 100 years and two continents, often exceeds his grasp — and that of its practiced director, Ralph B. Peña — it does suggest a lively theatrical intelligence and a willingness to grapple with some outsize themes.

The play begins in 1930, mid-battle, with gunfire and screaming. Out of water, out of rations and — apparently — out of time, two wounded soldiers (David Lee Huynh and Jon Norman Schneider) cower in a foxhole. They soothe themselves by telling a story about a cruel older brother, a kind younger brother and some magical gourds. In a scene set a decade or so later, during World War II, three adolescents (Sasha Diamond, Teresa Avia Lim and Jillian Sun), kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, dissociate from their circumstances by recounting the story of Shim-Cheong, a woman who sacrifices herself to protect her blind father.

These first scenes are the play’s most difficult. The circumstances are unimaginable in their horror, so it makes sense that Isaac and Peña struggle to envision them. In the scene with the soldiers, much of the initial dialogue comes down to screaming and moaning, with expletives flying around like shrapnel. In the scene with the young women, Isaac keeps most of the sexual violence offstage, but there is a lot of screaming here, too, and one act of tremendous brutality. The actors do what they can, but they strain to convey the dread and the panic of the characters, and in neither scene does the staging feel sufficient. An extended drag sequence — with Schneider playing the Sea King in a ballgown and sparkles — offers variety and brief respite, but it is a strange and dissonant choice.

After a confusing Korean War sequence, “Once Upon a (korean) Time” settles into a more confident mode, in a scene in which a daughter finds her birth mother — unfortunately, at a Korean-owned liquor store in the midst of the Los Angeles riots — and then another, set in present-day Koreatown, in which that same daughter, now a mother herself, meets up with her friends, all of them Korean American adoptees. At this point, it becomes clear — although, if you’re a savvy spectator, it was probably clear already — that these scenes and stories have been braided together to tell the story of one woman’s family.




Under Peña’s direction, the shifts between time periods, and between realism and fairy tale, are not always fluid. Se Hyun Oh’s set, which is mostly two monoliths, labors to suggest everything from a cave to a convenience store. Despite evocative lighting from Oliver Wason, flexible projections from Yee Eun Nam and Phuong Nguyen’s judicious costumes, these spaces rarely feel fully invoked. The final two scenes, in which stories are narrated but not fully enacted, are the most successful. And that could be either because these scenes are the least formally ambitious, or because they feel the most personal.

Isaac is not an adoptee, but, as he explains in the program notes, he grew up without much knowledge of his ancestry or Korean folklore. He has had to seek that out on his own, as an adult. And so the play, for all its temporal and geographical sweep, is also Isaac’s own story, one of longing for connection with history and place. He could have rendered this tale a lot more simply, but who wants to fault a playwright for big swings and stylistic daring? “Once Upon a (korean) Time” doesn’t quite fulfill its promise, but it suggests that Isaac has more stories to tell.

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‘Once Upon a (korean) Time’

Through Sept. 18 at La MaMa, Manhattan; ma-yitheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.