From the Google Docs: Review of "How to Be a Korean Woman"
From the Google Docs: Review of "How to Be a Korean Woman"
Sharing an unpublished draft of a recent DCTA article for multifaceted purposes
Finally, I’ll be doing something I was hoping to use this Substack for in the first place: publishing the drafts of my DC Theater Arts articles that my editor said were too long or otherwise not catered towards the interests of our audience!
I haven’t used my Substack for this purpose since publishing more frequently. I suppose that’s because I’ve simply done too good a job as a DCTA writer.
With regard to this particular review draft, my editor’s feedback was that I’d “written a smart insider essay for a professional dramaturgy journal, but the wind goes out of its sails for the ordinary theatergoer who's looking to see what's playing, what's worth seeing, and why it matters.”
I’ll quietly sidestep the fact that if you’re subscribed to this Substack, your interests probably fall along similar lines.
For publication on DCTA earlier this afternoon (read here), I cut about 400 words of the draft shared below, cutting from both my descriptions of the show’s plot and my analysis. In my second round of edits after getting feedback from my editor (who subscribes to State of the Arts), I found that I had included way too much detail about the plot of the performance no matter what audience I was writing for.
That is to say: by publishing this, I am not suggesting that this version is better than the one that was published. I think a) it offers a little more analysis regarding the play’s structure that some outside of DCTA’s audience would find interesting, and b) it really is too long. Respectively, I think there’s value in sharing the original version to share more of analysis, and to show why having an editor is important.
Begin article:
In this solo performance at Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center (EDCJCC)’s Theater J under the direction and dramaturgy of Zaraawar Mistry, returning after a string of performances here earlier this year, writer and performer Sun Mee Chomet recounts not only the largely unkind bureaucracy she fought through to find her birth parents as an adult after being given up for adoption at six months old but also the challenges she faced upon finding them. The play first recounts the search for the rewards of being loved, then illuminates the mortifying ordeal of being known, and is structured in two acts as such.
Sun Mee Chomet was adopted by a Protestant mother and Jewish father, and only had the resources to begin working to seek out her birth parents as an adult in her late thirties. As she reveals late in the play, her birth mother’s contact information was quickly lost upon her initial adoption, forcing her to wind through a path of bureaucracy and selfish corporate motives. After having claimed to have exhausted alternative methods of finding her birth parents, Chomet’s adoption agency caseworker suggests that Chomet try a particularly gauche Korean reality TV show that helps adoptees find their birth parents. Reluctantly, Chomet agrees, fueled by her last shred of hope to submit to manifold indignities along the way.
After her initial interview airs, Chomet is informed that the TV show was unable to weed out her true parents. Shortly thereafter, her former agent with the show contacts her to say that not only has she quit the show, but the show did find someone who was likely Chomet’s birth mother. However, they demanded payment from her in exchange for connecting her with her child. Nervous to do this for reasons that later become clear, Chomet’s birth mother declined to pay the fee, and the show covered it up. Thanks to tremendous risk from the agent, Chomet reunites with her birth mother.
But the reunion is not completely joyful. Chomet’s birth mother’s current husband is abusive, and his learning about her child born out of wedlock — at age 19, no less — would result in her “losing everything, including contact with her two sons.” Chomet is kept a secret, and her reunion with her mother after all those decades is tainted by the covertness of their interactions. After overcoming the odds to find her birth parents, Chomet’s experience meeting her mother is fraught with fear of her current husband finding out, shame from an element of her identity out of her control, and dashed hopes of starting anew with a birth family that would embrace her unconditionally. In a heartbreaking moment, Chomet says all she asks for is love that “envelops” her, like “water at the bottom of a waterfall.”
Both the first and second halves of the show — searching for and finding Chomet’s birth mother, and the aftermath of secret outings with her mother, aunts, and grandmothers to visit malls, relatives’ graves, secret bars, adoptee reunions, and more — focus on the coarse reality of being an adoptee, but address this question with arguably opposite storytelling structures.
The first half, by nature of its narrative, has a smooth exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution as Chomet locates and meets her birth mother. This first half is written with impressive tightness and organization; every sentence connects to the next, no word is included that doesn’t specifically contribute to the identified developing narrative.
Accordingly, the second half of the show is less tightly written, with less clear direction — even if that structure corresponds with Chomet’s lived experience.
This is the overarching narrative of the show: questing for unconditional love in a world fixed against you. The general relevance of the anecdotes in the second half to that narrative should be enough to make that latter part of the show structurally satisfying, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
In the first half of this show, Chomet shares little about her plans for what to do after she finds her mother — which is of course incredibly realistic. But because no mention of these plans is included in the first act, the one narrative thread we want to see tied up in this section is for her to find her birth parents, which she does. Thus, like Chomet, we almost forget to wonder about what she should or could do once they are found: she even acknowledges that upon finding her birth mother, she “lost motivation.” She had been single-mindedly working to find her mother for so long — she wasn’t sure it would even happen, and once she found her, she found herself unsure of how to proceed, overwhelmed and confused by all that was happening to her.
But I couldn’t escape the feeling that more could have been done to structure the second act in a way that didn’t feel so fundamentally different from the narratively captivating first act. The first act has set us up to anticipate another immersive and tightly written rising action and climax. It is likely that the second act’s structure would not stick out as being so different and comparatively unsatisfying as it is if the first act were not so strict and tightly wound around traveling from point A to point B. Going from the tight rising action-based structure to a motif-based, poetic exploration of numerous experiences, especially without a dividing intermission, made the second half of the show’s narrative underwhelming, given that even though each anecdote in the second act revolves around that central thesis but introduces a plethora of new questions.
These questions are raised not just by the narrative elements that the presence of an anecdote inherently generates but by Chomet’s narration itself. Chomet will mention how a particular experience with her mother introduced new questions of how to confront domestic abuse, how to confront cultural difference back in Minnesota, how to convince a mother to overcome her own fears, and other serious issues, all of which are significant enough to draw the audience’s attention — away from other core narratives. Further, Chomet’s Korean heritage only enters the narrative fray in some of the gender-based expectations of her birth mother, aunts, and grandmother. The script barely delves into questions of what it actually means to be a Korean woman, only addressing the show’s title’s question in a few sentences. It is a supporting narrative point, but Korean culture specifically is not made central to the narrative as a whole.
But crucially: no real-life story fits into a story structure. We should not give Joseph Campbell that kind of power over our lives. As I developed this reaction to this show, I felt uneasy — is it appropriate to say that experiences should be adjusted in their retelling to suit conventional story structure? Especially when using conventional and then unconventional structure more accurately matches Chomet’s real-life experience? I found myself thinking that it would even help the show if the second half’s narrative chaos were addressed — but even suggesting this feels like asking for Chomet’s baring of her soul around the greatest challenges of her life to be properly plated and garnished with a maraschino cherry for easier consumption by audiences.
At the end of the day, who are we to tell Chomet to change the way that she expresses her life story, especially one as heartbreaking and harrowing as this one? And I am not an adoptee, and I’m a quarter-Vietnamese, not Korean or culturally Asian. I am not meant to identify with the intricacies of these experiences. An adoptee of any race would likely feel deeply seen by the depiction of narrative variance on stage in the second half.
But still — I can’t help but feel that the show would not lose any impact on those who share in Chomet’s experiences if the second half were organized around fewer ideas, and led to a second rising action and climax.
Chomet is a masterful performer, incorporating impressions and dance into her time on stage. Her scriptwriting walks the perfect line between stream-of-consciousness, personal and emotional thinking, and organized storytelling. She is a joy to watch, and the phenomenal lighting work from Jesse Belsky differentiating characters and narrative moments makes her even more so. This show is affecting regardless of your background or experiences: don’t we all search for unconditional love? Chomet’s description of this quest as it has taken form in her life may put some of the deepest questions on your own heart into words.
Venue name and address: Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center (EDCJCC), Theater J
Run dates: September 12th-September 22nd
Running Time including intermission: Approximately 85 minutes with no intermission
Ticket prices (or price range): $69.99, including $6.99 service charge
Link to online program/playbill if available
The venue's current COVID safety policy: Masks optional.
Thus ends the draft.