How do you write a funny play about North Korea?
Stories about North Korea aren’t typically funny. After all, how does one make light of the conditions of people living in one of the most impoverished places on earth, under the thumb of a repressive regime? When the Korean playwright Hansol Jung set about answering that question, in 2014, she came up with “Wild Goose Dreams,” a digital-age love story, currently playing at the Public Theatre. Set in modern-day Seoul, the play depicts an unlikely romance between Nanhee, a thirtysomething North Korean defector, and Minsung, a middle-aged South Korean who works at Samsung and sends the bulk of his income to his wife and daughter in the United States. The pair meet on a dating Web site called Love Genie, expecting little more than a drunken one-night stand, which is dramatized, excruciatingly, onstage. (An anxious Minsung asks Nanhee, “Is it sexy to apologize during sex in North Korea?”) Improbably, the relationship grows into something meaningful.
“In the beginning, I thought the play would be a happy love story,” Jung said the other day, between spoonfuls of seafood soup at Cho Dang Gol, a Korean restaurant in midtown. “I don’t know how suicide and shotguns got in there.”
Jung, who is thirty-five but looked much younger in a baseball cap and a hoodie with cat ears, was having lunch with Leigh Silverman, the play’s director. When she began writing the play, she said, she wanted to get away from “stick figure” representations of people in both countries: South Koreans as stewards of progress, North Koreans as helpless victims of fate.
