Seattle’s Yun Theatre presents a small story with big, brave ideas

Theater review

Memory is a slippery thing. It’s a torment, a balm, a mystery, an escape, a wound we can’t stop pressing on — everyone’s very own unreliable narrator. 

In Yilong Liu’s play “June is the First Fall,” now running at Theatre Off Jackson presented by up-and-coming company Yun Theatre, memory is all of the above. 

As we open, Don (Sebastian Wang), a young gay man, is coming home to Hawaii for the first time in 10 years, back to the house he moved into at 3 years old when he and his sister and mother left China to join his father in the Rainbow State. 

As the family packs up the house in preparation for a move, Don re-connects with his father David (Owen Yen), his sister Jane (Jen-Ai Clinton) and her fiancé Scott (Andy Park-Buffelen), who was also a teenage crush of Don’s and is now an employee at David’s restaurant. Over the course of Don’s weeklong visit, these four relive the past and try — oh, how they try — to connect in the present. 

Well, that’s the plot, anyway. The story is much wider, broader, deeper, as it slips back and forth in time, into remembered moments with Don and Jane’s mother, Yu Qin (in an enchanting performance from Zoe Ding). Memory plays are fallible, because memory is fallible, and Liu plays with this weakness beautifully, giving us a window into these characters’ — and therefore, our own — complexities and contradictions. How do you remember a mother you loved, who is also a mother who hurt you? How do you connect with a family if they don’t, or can’t, really know you? How do you weave the many disparate parts of your identity into a cohesive whole? 

Can you, truly, go home again? 

Liu’s writing occasionally falls into the trap of over-explaining information that a character would already know, for the sake of the audience, but overall, the language is lovely: poetic but not overwrought, naturalistic but not flat. 

Though tenderly co-directed by Christie Zhao and David Le, the production felt slightly longer than it should be. Many scenes and transitions had a bit too much air in them, and that loose pacing kept the show’s high-emotion moments from reaching boiling point in a way that felt authentic. Similarly, I wish the production had paid a smidgen more attention to the tiny ways in which you can lose an audience’s trust: a too-light suitcase, an obviously empty cup, the unrealistic miming of an everyday activity (in this case, rolling down a manual car window). Nitpicking, yes, but the devil, as they say, is in the details.

But looking at the big picture, Yun Theatre is an excellent addition to our local scene, making solid, thoughtful work, tackling big ideas and choosing beautiful plays we otherwise might not see. Bring ‘em on.