The metacultural theater of Oh T'ae-sŏk

Here for the first time are translations of five plays by Oh T'ae-sok, Korea's leading playwright and one of the most original dramatists and stage-directors working in Asia today. Drawing inspiration from both East and West and combining styles as disparate as ancient Korean masked dance-drama and contemporary avant-garde theater, these plays range from raucous comedy to historical tragedy, from explorations of the impact of the Korean War to bitter satires of modern Korean life. In Bicycle, a village clerk encounters spirits of the dead, the real-life victims of a fire set by North Korean soldiers thirty years ago, and a family of lepers whose daughter burns down her parents' house in a desperate act of penitential sacrifice. The tragedy Intimacy between Father and Son takes its inspiration from the dilemma of an eighteenth-century king whose only son and heir developed a mysterious mental disorder that manifested itself in murderous violence and sexual promiscuity. In the end, the king must decide whether to force his son to commit suicide or risk the destruction of the dynasty. In the wildly comic Ch'un-p'ung's Wife, derived from a traditional tale of a wife's search for her philandering husband, Oh explores the difficult position of women in modern Korean society through ironic rituals of birth and death. The highly charged historical drama Lifecord traces the fate of six scholars who remain loyal to a young king after he is forced to abdicate, providing Oh with an opportunity to investigate the implications of communal guilt and loyalty to family, king, and country. Why Did Shim Ch'ong Plunge into the Sea Twice? takes aim at the materialism of modern urban life in a jarring revision of the legend of Shim Ch'ong, who volunteered to drown herself to cure her father's blindness. In Oh's violent retelling of this classic prose narrative, Shim Ch'ong finds herself in a seamy underworld of thieves, pimps, and prostitutes, where her plunge into the sea offers no hope of redemption but serves rather as a moving reminder of the fragility of goodness in contemporary society.