Stories that exist in between

MRS. K used to give piano lessons. But that was years ago. These days, she sits alone in her living room, eager to chat with anyone who comes to visit. Nobody does. Soon, we realize that things are not what they seem. For starters, Mrs. K is not alone. She exists, as do many people in Julia Cho's plays, in a twilight world crowded with memories that hover like ghosts.

In "The Piano Teacher," which opens Friday at South Coast Repertory, we discover what happens when Mrs. K confronts these ghosts by calling former students, ostensibly to hear what they're up to but really to answer long-nagging questions: Why did so many pupils quit so abruptly? Did it have to do with them? Or with her? Or, perhaps, with her late husband?

"The play is about a woman, a very good and very decent woman, who is invested in a certain version of her life," Cho says. "She goes more and more into the past, and you start to see her blind spots. Then you see another possible story besides the one she's telling. The play becomes a play about a story, and about stories being told, and about stories not being told. It's also about the impact that stories can have."

The murky relationship between fact and fiction fascinates Cho, who considers reality to be a shaky concept since everything we experience is a figment of someone's imagination. Such ideas have made the 31-year-old L.A. native one of the most intriguing young voices in American theater. In just a few years she has won acclaim at leading stages on both coasts with plays that resemble puzzle boxes, each constructed with a blend of intuition and intellect, each intended to unfold in ways that are poignant, funny, bleak or unexpected.

Cho doesn't usually write in real time, preferring to loop between past and present and to let her audience figure out what and whom to believe. While some characters resort to deception or denial, many are like Mrs. K, guilty mostly of being human. Even so, consequences must be paid.

"Julia's plays are piercing and unforgiving investigations into the soul," says director Chay Yew, who has helped to develop or stage most of Cho's major works. "She writes with startling clarity and without embellishment about the real people who inhabit our world. She makes no excuses for them and never sentimentalizes them.

"Her plays are deceptive," he adds, "because her characters often live and breathe between the lines ... they are refreshingly articulate yet inarticulate in their pains and joys and sorrows."