Korean fairy tales tend to be spooky. Some are more terrifyingly warped than the Brothers Grimm.For example, in the Korean version of “Cinderella”, Cinderella die(For a while, anyway.) Murder, starvation, and sacrifice form the dark core of this folk tradition, at least in the stories told by Daniel K. Isaac. “Once upon a time (Korean)” A production of the Ma-Yi Theater Company at La MaMa on Wednesday.
Isaac is best known as a stage and film actor (“The Chinese Lady”, “Billions”). This is his first produced play. And his ambitions for this drama that spans two continents for nearly a hundred years are often beyond his grasp, and that is beyond the grasp of experienced director Ralph B. Peña. .
The play opens with gunshots and screams during a 1930 battle. Out of water, under rations, and apparently out of time, two of his wounded soldiers (David Lehine and John Norman Schneider) are crouching in their foxholes. They soothe themselves by telling stories about a cruel older brother, a kinder younger brother, and a magical gourd. About 10 years later, in a scene during World War II, three young men (Sasha Diamond, Teresa Avia Lim, and Gillian Sun) are kidnapped by the Japanese military, made into sex slaves, and forced into self-immolation by telling their Sims’ stories. disconnected from our situation. – A woman who sacrifices herself to protect her blind father.
These first scenes are the most difficult scenes of the play. The situations are unimaginable, and it makes sense that Isaac and Peña are having a hard time imagining them. The taunts are flying around like shards. In the scenes with the young women, Isaac keeps most of the sexual violence behind the scenes, but even here there’s a lot of screaming and tremendous brutality he does one. The actors do the best they can, but they strain to convey the fear and panic of the characters, and neither scene feels sufficiently staging: long drag his sequences (Schneider throws balls in his gown and glitters). Playing the Sea King) offers variety and a brief respite, but a strange and dissonant choice.
After a confusing Korean War sequence, “Once Upon a Time” settles into a more confident mode in the scene where the daughter finds her birth mother. In the Los Angeles riots, and now another riot set in Koreatown, the same daughter who became a mother meets a friend who is a Korean-American adoptee. At this point, it becomes clear that these scenes and stories are woven together to tell the story of her one-woman family.
Under Peña’s supervision, the changes between eras and between realism and fairy tale are not always fluid. Mostly his two monolithic Se Hyun Oh sets strive to suggest everything from caves to convenience stores. Despite Oliver Wason’s evocative lighting, Yee Eun Nam’s flexible projections, and Phuong Nguyen’s sensible costumes, these spaces are rarely fully brought out. His final two scenes, in which the story is told but not fully enacted, are the most successful. And that could be because these scenes are either the least ambitious or feel the most personal.
Isaac isn’t adopted, but he grew up without knowing much about his ancestry and Korean folklore, as explained in the program notes. As an adult, he had to seek it out on his own. So the play, in all its temporal and geographical extent, is also the story of Isaac himself, one of his longing for connection with history and place. He could have put this story in a simpler way, but who wants to blame the playwright for big swings and stylistic boldness? but it does suggest that Isaac has more stories to tell.
once upon a time (Korean) time
Until September 18th at La Mama in Manhattan. ma-yitheatre.orgRunning time: 1 hour 35 minutes.