What is truth? From First Lady Suite (1993) through Hello Again (1994), Marie Christine (1999), and The Wild Party (2000), the self-taught Michael John LaChiusa established himself as a composer-lyricist-librettist for sophisticated New York theater audiences to reckon with, though not one to pack crowds into big houses for long runs. Then, in the August 2005 issue of Opera News, LaChiusa dropped a bombshell. “The American musical is dead,” he declared, taking aim at commercial juggernauts like Hairspray, Wicked, and Spamalot. “There’s nothing wrong with mindless entertainment,” LaChiusa told me a few weeks later. “Just don’t call it art.” His idea of the real thing was then on display in the audacious See What I Wanna See, briefly on the boards Off Broadway at the Public Theater. Drawn from three tales by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the “Cubist” show contrasted a Rashomon-style murder in the first act with a post-9/11 miracle in the second, and the apotheosis it built to ranks with the finales of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. This season’s Out of the Box Theatrics revival showcases a cast of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as well as Asian-inflected puppetry designed by the masterful Tom Lee, underscoring the Japanese DNA of the source material. —Matthew Gurewitsch