That's her in the middle with her Golden Pig that we got as trophies. Like every other Westerner you meet here in Korea, Emma is a teacher. She's British and she's like 34 which caught me off guard because she looks much younger. She's also small, so I'm sure that adds to it. That's Justin on the left. He wrote the play that won the best overall play award. Justin is generally pretty cocky and obnoxious and likes to be in control, but he's an all right dude sometimes. He brought a bunch of us new native teachers around Daegu when we first got here, showing us some Western bars and restaurants, and so on, but with the attitude that he was doing us noobs a favor like we would never be able to figure out the scene without him.
I had never been involved with theater before, nor had any interest in being involved with it other than watching some plays now and then. The reworking of The Odyssey into a parable of illegal immigration by a small group at a theater in Portsmouth stands out as one of the best shows I have ever seen, and some vague memories of Dr. Suess stories performed on stage at the Academy when I was a kid rate high too. I wasn't really planning to be involved in this 24 hour theater production either but I decided I could support a friend by doing so, and what the hell.
Kristin is a Canadian I met my first weekend here at the Daegu World Bodypainting Festival. She was a drama major at university (I think), and brought up the idea of forming a theater troupe to do some shows in Daegu once in awhile. I recall her mentioning the idea of a 24 hour production to me, and me showing a level of interest sufficient enough to be supportive, but low enough to avoid any sort of implied interest in actually being involved. Eventually she formed a Facebook group, got a bunch of people interested, and held some meetings that I kept hearing about because I so graciously accepted her invitation to the Facebook group. I volunteered to be an actor finally when she sent a message to everyone saying she needed more actors, and I figured I might as well do something different and all I would have to do is memorize some lines. I find that forcing yourself to do things you really don't want to do is hard sometimes, but usually beneficial, either in that you find you enjoyed it, or you get a better understanding of why you didn't.
On the night before the performances, everyone involved met at Club That and was split into teams and given instructions for rehearsing and performing the next day. There were six teams, each with a writer, about four actors, and some with directors. My team consisted of Emma, myself, the writer Gary, and (a different) Justin. Another girl was not feeling well but was supposed to meet us at Club That the next morning to practice. I sensed the play was going to suck when Gary was asking us for suggestions, and talking about using the roof, our assigned location, to stage a moronic tale of sex gone wrong and/or vomiting on passersby below. Fortunately, as I was strolling down the street the following morning, I ran into Kristin who reported that she never got a script emailed to her from Gary, and that she hadn't heard from him since she saw him out partying at 2AM. At this point it was easy to figure out that he had gone out and got loaded and forgotten about or not had time to write a script for us, which is really lame because Kristin said he had been completely gung-ho about the project beforehand. Like I said though, it seemed like he was going to come up with a shitty play anyway, and I certainly couldn't give him any sympathy for staying out late because I had only gotten four hours of sleep myself, thanks to my Korean lady friend Chunny wanting to go to an all-night dance club whose atmosphere was mainly cigarettes and vaporized sweat. Ugh.
Emma and I decided to do everything on our own after the sick actress turned out to still be sick, and the other actor, Justin, never showed up. I think all the other groups were deadbeat free, so I don't know what was wrong with ours. We were trying to come up with ideas and on the way to get breakfast, and I recalled that a few days earlier was World Philosophy Day, or something like that, and I lifted an idea for a play from this piece I read on the BBC's site. I used one of the moral dilemmas from the first section to frame a play in which a person is forced by some sort of abductor to choose one other captive to die, or else all of the captives die. After talking about the general idea of what we wanted to do, we were both pretty excited about it, and glad those other deadbeats didn't come out.
Our play consisted of three scenes, the first which poses the dilemma and shows someone held captive with a gun to his head, the second which examines the deciding captive's thought process, and a third which is the decision. The first and third scenes lasted about 15 seconds each, as the choice was supposed to be made in about five seconds. The second part is the meat of the play, where Emma represents the emotional side of the captive's brain, and I represent the rational side. We argue and debate over which of the other five hostages should die, based on what we can see of the strangers' ages, sex, and appearances.
There's me trying to talk some sense into her. We came up with the general idea of how things would work, but didn't feel that writing specific lines would be time efficient or any fun, so we half-winged the performance. We practiced beforehand a few times, but each time it was a bit different. We used shoes as representatives of the other hostages, work boots for a blue collar worker, a man's shoe and a woman's shoe for the androgyne, and so on. In the end, the play went pretty well. I was a bit nervous because it seemed like that was the thing to do, plus there were probably more than 100 people in the audience, which totally jammed the second floor of Club That. I was pretty impressed with the whole event, and I must give Kristin credit for organizing everything, and the other performers credit for putting together plays that were much better than what I expected to see. For our prizes, we won some free drinks and gift certificates which was pretty sweet. I stuck around after the other shows, which were all decent at worst, assuming you were near the front and could hear them - I hope I spoke loud enough during mine, only long enough to get my free drinks and reassert my dominance on the dartboards. I was still going on the four hours of sleep the previous night, and felt a cold coming on, so I cut out with my loot and shredded voice and went home to sleep for ten hours.
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