A shaggy white guy in a bellboy uniform knocks on the door of a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea, a little bumbling and out of place. He’s come to deliver a package to an American woman named Ana, but she thinks there must be some mistake: No one knows she’s there.  It is 1975, the day before her birthday, and even she doesn’t understand why she’s come, checking in with an urn containing the ashes of her father, Luke. This was, apparently, his idea — and the bellboy, whose name tag reads “JC,” seems to be in on the plan. Inside the package is Luke’s diary from World War II, and the story of Ana’s own origin.  “Was he sickly, or pale, or suicidal looking?” Ana asks. “The man who gave this to you?”  “Not really?” says the bellboy, a sweetly befuddled Jesus in disguise. “Had a scruffy beard, nice teeth, oh, and a little limp on the left leg. Right leg? Left leg. Right leg?”  Comedy of the laugh-out-loud variety is the surprising top note in Hansol Jung’s surreal, somberly titled “Among the Dead,” a smart and stinging new play that delves into painful business indeed. Ana’s Korean mother spent much of the war as a so-called comfort woman, forced by the Japanese Army to have sex with its soldiers. Or, as she puts it to Ana’s father, an American private, when she meets him in the Burmese jungle, “I am military supply for Japanese soldier.”  Time blurs and blends in this strikingly designed Ralph B. Peña world-premiere production for Ma-Yi Theater Company, at Here. When Ana (Julienne Hanzelka Kim), high on some pot she got from Jesus, reads her father’s diary, we meet Luke (Mickey Theis) as he was in 1944, young and not so courageous, a rebuke to the Hollywood notion of the heroic G.I.  We also see her mother, whom we know only as Number Four (Diana Oh), back in Seoul after the war. It is 1950, and she is violently angry at the world — and, heartbreakingly, not sure why. She waits in vain for Luke to come to her as promised.  The constant here is Jesus, hilariously played by Will Dagger. By Luke’s side in uniform during the war, Jesus watches as he commits acts both decent and revoltingly inhumane. To Number Four, who still wears Luke’s rosary around her neck, Jesus is a compassionate friend, quick to forgive when she — whoops — stabs him. “Happens,” he says.  When she winds up submerged in a river, collateral damage once again in someone else’s fight, he stays with her, and tries to coax her to the surface. “Breathe in water, and your absence will do things to the world,” he says. “Kick your legs, and your life will do things to the world.”  With this outraged, deeply compassionate play, Ms. Jung is kicking, and expanding our understanding.  Category Off Off Broadway, Comedy/Drama, Play  Credits Written by Hansol Jung; Directed by Ralph B. Peña  Cast Will Dagger, Julienne Hanzelka Kim, Diana Oh and Mickey Theis  Closing Date November 26, 2016  This information was last updated: Sep. 27, 2016  “Among the Dead” continues through Saturday at Here, 145 Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, here.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.  A version of this review appears in print on November 22, 2016, on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: War Intimacies, and the Mysteries Left Behind. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
This Hansol Jung play, set from the 1940s through the mid-1970s, centers on a woman with an urn of her father’s ashes and includes Jesus in disguise.