The Theatre Times: Yun Mi Hyun is a playwright based in South Korea. After writing fiction and poetry in her early career, she debuted as a playwright in 2012 with the one-act play Can We Meet?, which won the Korean Playwright Association new play award. Her major works include The Vegetable Garden Killer (2012), Young Husidin: A Love Story (2014), Chulsoo’s Rebellion (2015), Texas Aunt (2017), and The Wooden Boat (2019). She has also written the book and lyrics for numerous new musicals and operas. Her plays have won many awards, including the Byeoksan Drama Award, best play at the Donga Theatre Awards, best play at the Seoul Theatre Festival, and the Presidential Award at the Korean Theatre Festival.
2 comments:
I immensely enjoyed this conversation and the brief history gleaned from it. Admittedly, I don't read as many plays as I should, but I'm always on the lookout for playwrights to add to my ever-growing, unread collection of works. I'm intrigued by the Yun Mi Hyun's experience writing poetry and fiction and how that influences her playwriting. The caution she received from her professors about losing her "voice" when transitioning into plays was surprising. I wouldn't have thought that writing plays was that fundamentally different from poetry or even fiction, even if the structure is quite different. But as the interviewer put it, theatre is a collaborative effort. For any artist working in theatre, their creative process and "voice" is at the mercy of others. Or perhaps a better way to put that is that the individual creative "voice" becomes a communal "voice".
But this piece also reminds me how important it is to explore playwrights from other cultures. Of course, I'm aware of the long-standing conflict between North and South Korea, but only from a global standpoint. I haven't often thought how deeply that conflict has affected the people of those States. We think of North and South Korea as separate countries here, not as a "country divided". We think of South Korea as "good" but as Yun exposes in her work, there are many who are suffering in South Korea under broken systems. These are important stories to tell. I hope to see more of her work performed here in the US.
I really enjoyed reading this interview, I always enjoy learning about artists, specifically theatre artists, outside of America. It's easy to forget sometimes that there is a whole world of theatre outside of what we experience on the daily, and all of it is equally as important and meaningful. The conversation they had about reunification and the public desire was very interesting. I had only ever heard about the Korean was from an outside standpoint, but never really heard the views of the Korean people. The fact that so many of them dreamed of being reunified was something I didn't expect. However, as new generations arise, there is less and less talk of reunification. Is such an interesting concept to write a play about and Yun took it in such an intriguing direction.
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