In “Jesa”, a new play at the Public Theater by Jeena Yi, four Korean American sisters reunite to remember their late parents. The title refers to the Korean tradition, rooted in Confucianism, that involves offering food, wine, and prayers to ancestors, usually on a death anniversary or during a major festival.

But as these siblings exhume fond and fraught memories, old wounds reopen, secrets spill out, and they are forced to confront frayed relationships and the disarray of their lives left behind on this earth.