GUIDING LIGHT

“Regretfully, So the Birds Are” and “White Girl in Danger.”

- HELEN SHAW

Julia Izumi’s play, about transnational adoptees, employs soap-opera melodrama.

For many of us who love experimental theatre and the deep fringe, soap operas were a gateway entertainment. Any given arc on, say, “Days of Our Lives”— remember when Marlena was possessed twice, and she (re)married the priest who exorcised her?—can go toe-to-toe with the avant-garde’s dream-logic, postmodern approach to character and its calculated use of shock. Soaps also have old theatrical bones: they’re related to nineteenth-century melodrama, with its emotion-triggering musical underscoring and extravagant, even exuberant, treatment of female peril. It’s unsurprising, then, that two new formally adventurous shows are recognizably soapy: Julia Izumi’s “Regretfully, So the Birds Are,” at Play wrights Horizons, and the Second Stage and Vineyard co-production of “White Girl in Danger” (at the Tony Kiser Theatre), a new musical by Michael R. Jackson, following up on his Pulitzer- and Tonywinning masterpiece, “A Strange Loop.”

Life in both of these shows is extreme, and death hardly registers. For instance, in “Regretfully,” the white Asian-studies professor Cam (Gibson Frazier) is dead, but he stands in his family’s front yard as a snowman, still inaccurately lecturing his three adopted children as his wife (Kristine Nielsen) languishes in jail. (This sounds like a cut story line from “Passions.”) Izumi doesn’t make us wait for exposition. On page 4, Neel (Sky Smith) hurls this at his sister Mora (Shannon Tyo):