Hannah and the Dread Gazebo: Love, Loss, and Life in the DMZ

Among the selections for this year's Bay Area Playwrights Festival, I was especially intrigued by Jiehae Park's Hannah and the Dread Gazebo, the story of a Korean-American family trying to understand the meaning behind their grandmother's absurdly flamboyant suicide. Hannah is the recipient of her grandmother's final request, the fulfillment of a 100%-bona-fide-hearts-desire-level-wish which her thoroughly Americanized family has no way of comprehending. In a series of bizarre, schadenfreude-laden twists and turns involving fairy tales, dream sequences, and an especially hilarious chat with Kim Jong Il's ghost, she is forced to confront the secrets of the DMZ and the intricacies of a culture and heritage she never really knew. 

We asked Jiehae Park, playwright extraordinaire, about the process of writing the play and how her own experiences as an Asian-American influenced her work.

Her response: 

"A director recently pointed out (during a reading rehearsal for a different new play) that the concept of "legacy" kept coming up again and again in the work. I think it's a fascinating theme to view through an immigrant lens...which is, I guess, a slightly pretentious way of saying-- as someone who came to this country quite young, and has only a hazy sense of where she came from, the idea of what is passed down both to and from me is really powerful. What is this thing that's supposed to mean something to me? It's maybe a little funny looking and I maybe don't quite "get it," but there's something there that's drawing me in. I love things that toe the line between comic and just plain awful, and I think that sense of loss can bounce around in that liminal space, looking for answers."

In Hannah, that "liminal space" finds itself physicalized in the DMZ, the buffer zone between North and South Korea and a bizarre world unto itself with its own code of law. An area with even more palpable tension and uncertainty than the rest of the world, the DMZ proves itself to be an exceptionally weird corner of the globe. 

A few fun facts about it:

• The flagpole wars: In the 1980s, the South Korean government built a 323 ft tall flagpole with a 287 lb South Korean flag in Daeseong-dong. North Korea responded by building what was then the tallest flagpole in the world at 525 ft with a 595 lb North Korean flag in Kijŏng-dong. Though both were eventually topped by others in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan, the rival flagpoles remain a symbol of what some refer to as "the flagpole wars."
• What not to wear: Visiting tourists are prohibited from wearing distressed jeans, lest the North Korean government use pictures of them as propaganda proving the poverty and terrible quality of life in democratic societies.

• Beer in North Korea? In an effort to bring decent beer to North Korea, the former ambassador to Switzerland bought a British Brewery in 2000 and had it moved brick by brick to the capital in Pyongyang.

If Hannah and the Dread Gazebo sounds like your kind of show, this Saturday (July 27th, 2013) is the last day to see it at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. 
Get your tickets here before they sell out!