Near the start of “An American Soldier,” Danny Chen (Brian Vu) stumbles distraught through the crowd gathered in a military courtroom. 

For much of my life,
I felt invisible
Do you know why I enlisted?
Do you know why I went to war?
Will you hear my voice?

His voice rings out, but nobody on stage hears it, because Private Chen is dead – a ghost at the trial of his sergeant, who is being accused of negligent homicide in Chen’s death.

The opera is based on a true story.  Chen, an American-born son of Chinese immigrants who grew up in Manhattan’s Chinatown, committed suicide at an army post in Afghanistan in 2011 at the age of 19, after weeks of  slurs, taunts, humiliating tasks and physical attacks by his superiors and fellow American soldiers.

It’s a horrible story, and it’s told powerfully, under the direction of Chay Yew (best known among New York theatergoers for helming “Cambodian Rock Band” and “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord”), with a starkly beautiful design,and a largely faithful libretto by David Henry Hwang (best-known for the play “M. Butterfly,” and the musical “Soft Power.”) Huang Ruo’s sophisticated, rhythmic, Asian-inflected score, performed by the 38-piece American Composers Orchestra and a gloriously-voiced ten-member cast, may be only occasionally melodious, but it is always forceful.

After a prologue showing figures in shadow approaching a black-and-white close-up of the fallen soldier’s face (the first of several visually arresting moments) then a first scene at the start of the court martial, we’re taken back in time to a rooftop in Chinatown, where Danny as a high school senior talks of his plans to enlist to his skeptical best friend Josephine Young (exquisite soprano Hannah Cho.)  He tells her, and, later, his mother (Nina Yoshida Nelsen) that he’s tired of being treated like a foreigner in his own land, that he wants to prove (especially after September 11^th)  that he’s just as much of an American as anybody else born here.

  According to reported accounts, Chen’s actual best friend was a man, Raymond Dong, but turning the character female tints several scenes with the possibility of romantic feelings. This gets its most lovely expression in a tuneful duet when the two are thousands of miles apart, where “the moon is so much smaller/ the moon is so much sadder.”

Josephine also figures in the lighter scenes with Danny’s mother  who can’t read English, and so Josephine reads Danny’s letters home, humorously applying a more delicate sensibility.
 Danny: The .50 Cal rifle. It’s damn awesome. Real Call of Duty shit.
Josephine: He’s having a good time! 

But most of the scenes, which alternate between testimony in the courtroom, and scenes at boot camp in Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Wainwright, Alaska, and then Kandahar, Afghanistan, are increasingly brutal.

At first Danny adjusts to the aggressively macho atmosphere (He sings along with his fellow soldiers “The food tastes like crap/Our muscles hurt like hell/We all hate the sarge/We’re horny as fuck.”)  But as the only Asian-American in his platoon, he is more and more singled out.

His main tormentor – the one whose trial we attend — is Sg. Aaron Marcum (a fictionalized name, portrayed by Alex DeSocio) who calls Chen “dragon lady” and comes up with horrendous punishments for the slightest (or non-existent) infractions. 

It would be hard for me to argue that “An American Soldier” is as layered or resonant as Hwang’s “M Butterfly,” which is also based on a true story, or other works of theater that deal with some of the same issues, settings and themes, above all the consequences of group prejudice (Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play” and Uhry and Brown’s “Parade” come to mind.) 

But it is equally hard to ignore that the opera – which, though sung almost entirely in English, has captions in both English and Chinese – is being performed at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, which is about fifteen minutes away from the building on Elizabeth Street in Chinatown where Danny Chen grew up, a street which is now also designated in his honor Private Danny Chen Way.

It’s inconsolably, bizarrely moving that “An American Soldier” ends with the grieving mother beneath a shattered moon and a shattering piece of music, right after she explains that she’s kept his bedroom exactly the same, stocked with his favorites, a Burger King Whopper and a bag of Skittles, that she hasn’t ever touched.  

 An American Soldier
Perelman Performing Arts Center through May 19
Running time: Two hours, including one intermission
Tickets: $54 to $183, with discounts for under 30, responders, and members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community) 
Composed by Huang Ruo
Libretto by David Henry Hwang
Conducted by Carolyn Kuan
Directed by Chay Yew
Scenic design by Daniel Ostling, costume design by Linda Cho, lighting design by Jeanette Yew, sound design by David Bullard, projection design by Nicholas Hussong, wigs/hair design by Tom Watson, choreography by Ann Yee, fight direction by UnkleDave’s Fight-house.
Cast: Brian Vu as Pvt. Danny Chen, Hannah Cho as Josephine Young, Alex DeSocio as Sg. Aaron Marcum, Nina Yoshida Nelsen as Mother Chen, Ben Brady, Cierra Byrd, James C. Harris, Shelen Hughes, Joshua Sanders, Christian Simmons, Misson Ghim, Luke Harnish, Angelal Yam, WooYoung Yoon