Once up there with "no use crying over spilt milk" and "a penny saved is a penny earned," the once-durable bromide "the camera never lies" has been Photoshopped into uselessness. But, as playwright Naomi Iizuka suggests in the intriguing Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West, the darkroom has long been an accomplice in duplicitous exposures.

Iizuka's new play is having its world premiere at Berkeley Rep, where her 36 Views was seen in 2001, and she is again exploring Western fascination, both artistic and exploitative, with Eastern artifacts. The new play shuttles back and forth in time, between a seedy section of Yokohama of the late 19th century and the shiny Tokyo of the present day. Photography becomes the iris through which racism, homosexuality, prostitution, forgery, xenophobia, and a libidinous American matron come into a complicated collage.

Japan, as you may recall from high school history, was an adamantly isolated country until 1854, when the United States sent Commodore Perry to suggest that Japanese participate in the world economy or risk attack. While Westerners gathered trinkets from the exotic Orient, Japan latched onto Western-style industrialization and abandoned the feudalism of shoguns and samurais romanticized by so many Westerners.

That's where Iizuka starts her play, as the prim wife (a deceptively genteel Kate Eastwood Norris) of an Asian-hating merchant (a believably gruff Danny Wolohan) finds her way into a photo studio in Yokohama's red-light district. The cynical photographer (crisply played by Bruce McKenzie) is a misanthropic entrepreneur from America with a taste for men. He's in the midst of photographing a mutely pliable male model (Johnny Wu) outfitted with relic props and very little clothing. The portraits are strictly for the tourist trade, but the sight of the heavily tattooed model changes one corseted tourist's life.

The play returns to her story, but also flashes forward to a swank modern Tokyo bar where Bruce McKenzie is now a smarmy collector of vintage Japanese photography and Johnny Wu is the slickly shady merchant who can supply the goods. Teresa Avia Lim gets a delightful showcase as the bemused interpreter.

One of the main pleasures of Iizuka's play is its unpredictability, taking surprising paths and revealing unexpected truths. And while it is certainly making comment on cultural imperialism, the play is, simply put, an engrossing entertainment in director Les Waters' stylish production. True, the dialogue in a few instances turns into over-extended monologues, but not to a damaging degree.

Mimi Lien's set and Andrew V. Nichols' lighting design are practically characters in themselves, with shifting panels and explosions of light to suggest photographic flashes. I was less keen on the video images intermittently projected on the walls of the set, finding them either distracting or obvious, or both.

A word that turns up in the script, "frisson," is a fitting description of the best moments in Strange Devices. Cultures are always destined to clash, but Iizuka captures those clashes in ways that frame them in brash new ways.

Concerning Strange Devices from the Distant West will run through April 11 at Berkeley Rep. Tickets are $33-$71. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to www.berkeleyrep.org.