DOODLES FROM THE MARGINS: THREE PLAYS by Hansol Jung
These three plays comprise an extraordinary body of work by a playwright who is formally ground-breaking, profoundly insightful, full of deep-feeling, and poetically nimble. In No More Sad Things, a woman goes to Maui to forget the heartbreak of her dying mother on the mainland, where she falls for a local Hawaiian boy who is way too young for her. In Wolf Play, an American queer couple adopts a Korean boy on the internet, from another American couple who finds the boy too hard to raise, they want to “give him back.” In Wild Goose Play, a South Korean man sends all the money he earns to his family in America while having an affair with a North Korean woman who is trying to defect. These three plays comprise an extraordinary body of work by a playwright who is formally ground-breaking, profoundly insightful, full of deep-feeling, and poetically nimble.
“I get weirded out by published plays. I never feel like they are finished, and yet the ink is so firm and out in the public, that it demands that I put the pencil down. So when Sarah, Jackie, and Sheila rang me up about this brilliant project the Puck in me thought sneakily, ‘I could maybe rattle that permanence of the public ink. I shall scribble and doodle the heaviness of a printed text into something more malleable and forgiving.’ It might just end up an annoying mess. But you know, it’s my mess, and if I’m gonna mess up personally in the public square, I’m glad it’s in the hands of Sledgehammer.” -Hansol Jung
I am not an actor human, this floor is forest earth, and to the left of that glaring exit light, a river flows, the width and length and velocity of the Egyptian Nile.
The truth is a wobbly thing, we shall wobble through our own set of truths like jello on a freight train, and tonight I add a bump to that journey and put to you my truth:
I am not what you think you see.
I am the wolf.
Aow.
yes, I am the wolf.
Aooow.
And then again because three translates to God in bible, infinity in Asia, and funny in theater: I am the wolf.
—from Wolf Play
OTHER TITLES IN THE SLEDGEHAMMER SERIES:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hansol Jung is a playwright and director from South Korea. Productions include Wolf Play (Artist Rep, Company One, Soho Rep), Wild Goose Dreams (Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Commissions from Public Theater (NY), Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, La Jolla Playhouse. She has received residencies and fellowships from Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, Royal Court, New York Theater Workshop's 2050 Fellowship, Berkeley Repertory, MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, and Page 73. Awards include the Steinberg Award, Whiting Award, DGF Award and the Helen Merrill Award. She has written for TV series Tales of the City (Netflix), Pachinko (Apple +) and is currently developing various onscreen projects with Bad Robot, Amazon Studios, and the team at Kindred Spirit/Ink Factory/Endeavor Content. Hansol is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, NYTW’s Usual Suspects, and The Kilroys. MFA: Yale School of Drama.
