Shifting South Korean Theatre: Jo-Yeol Park’s A Dialogue Between Two Long-necked People and Taesuk Oh’s Chunpung’s Wife

Spring 2009 47 Shifting South Korean Theatre: Jo-Yeol Park’s A Dialogue Between Two Long-necked People and Taesuk Oh’s Chunpung’s Wife Kyounghye Kwon1 Why is Waiting for Godot the most frequently staged Western play in Korean theatre history? Why are the absurdists Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco among the top twelve most staged Western playwrights?2 Further, why is it that Korean scholar Junseo Im3 goes so far as to say that almost all South Korean plays since the 1960s have been more or less influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd, and that absurdist theatre can be regarded as a short cut to understanding Korean contemporary theatre?4 Beginning with a 1960 production of Ionesco’s La Leçon (The Lesson, 1951) by Sireomgeukjang (Experimental Theatre), numerous small Korean theatre groups staged Western existentialist and absurdist plays in the 1960s and 1970s.5 Korean directorYoung-Woong Lim has staged Waiting for Godot steadily for about forty years since 1969, and his 1988 production was lauded by Martin Esslin. In “The Reception of the Theatre of the Absurd and Korean Theatre,” Miyhe Kim analyzes this extraordinary engagement with Western absurdist theatre in South Korea, and traces the history of its reception. Kim departs from certain scholars’criticism that Korean theatre artists had received Western absurdist theatre and its aesthetics “uncritically” even when Western realism was not “adequately understood” in Korean theatre, thereby “possibly shaking the foundation of realistic theatre” in Korea. Instead, she argues that Korean theatre’s “active” reception of absurdist theatre should be respected because it has fostered the development of Korean theatre, although Korea should have approached absurdist theatre more judiciously and systematically.6 I would add that there is also no reason why non-realistic experimental theatre should have been explored only after Western realistic theatre7 had been thoroughly founded in Korea, especially given that, as my essay will show, non-realistic theatre is closer to Korea’s indigenous performance aesthetics. The suggestion that Korean theatre should follow the same artistic trajectory as the West (from the achievement of realistic theatre toward anti-realistic experimental theatre) implies an uncritical logic that privileges Western theatre history. As it has done thus far, Korean theatre must simultaneously negotiate the pluralities of global theatrical trends. Kim’s essay on the significance of Korean theatre’s reception of Western Kyounghye Kwon is a doctoral candidate in English at the Ohio State University with a Graduate Minor in Theatre and Performance. Her research and teaching interest areas include postcolonial theatre studies, 20th-century drama,AsianAmerican theatre, performance theory, and cultural studies. Her other scholarly essays can be found in Text & Presentation and Pinter Etc. (ed. Craig N. Owens, forthcoming). 48 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism absurdist theatre is my starting point. However, departing from Kim’s focus on the production of Western absurdist plays, I will concentrate on Korean plays that sometimes controversially evoked absurdist styles, and will situate a notable aesthetic shift in Korean postcolonial theatre from the 1970s in its local and global contexts. Korean theatre of the post-colonial8 period emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, and thus converged with the Theatre of the Absurd. This took the form of a unique and significant global and local aesthetic interpenetration in Korean postcolonial theatre. When an aesthetic grown from one cultural location migrates to another domain, it is bound to undergo adjustments and alterations, develop different emphases and unexpected additions, and/or demonstrate resistance. In this essay, I will first treat Korean theatre’s active engagement with absurdist theatre in the 1960s not as a West-centered case of evaluation and imitation, but as a significant glocal aesthetic phenomenon; it is from this perspective that I will approach JoYeol Park’s A Dialogue Between Two Long-Necked People and Taesuk Oh’s early plays. However, when it comes to Oh’s later theatre from the 1970s and onwards, I will discuss a specific mode of glocality, which I call “glocal-locality”—that is, the intersection of the global, the local, and the restored local cultures from the past within the larger local. Glocality: Jo-Yeol Park’s A Dialogue Between Two Long-necked People Although...