The stakes are certainly heightened by an ingrained sense of hierarchy and class and even a caste system—but some might say we have that in the West.
You can’t look at what someone is wearing and tell if they’re a billionaire or not in America. There is so much obfuscation that goes on in terms of looks, in terms of manner of speaking. All of those signifiers that used to be aids that societies have to go, “Well, that person’s the boss and I’m the worker”—that’s been eradicated, especially in America. And that kind of upending of the traditional structures comes with massive benefits for the privileged, but it doesn’t necessarily come with any benefits for the underprivileged.
That’s sort of a very non-American way of thinking about it, I would argue, in the that one of the things Americans like to celebrate about themselves is that society is flat and anyone can do anything.
I think that it can be more damaging socially to a whole group of disenfranchised people to think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, than it is to accept pathways where you go, okay, well, the average person of my abilities gets that far. And yes, I might be exceptional, but not everyone’s going to be exceptional.
Anyway, back to Chekhov—I’ve read about how Chekhov thought of this play as a comedy. It was then produced as more of a tragedy, but that there’s this tension inherent to it. How did you capture that balance while working in a different language?
I work 90 percent in languages that are not English: Dutch, French, Italian, German. And I think the difference between humor within the English-speaking world is sometimes bigger than the difference between English and non-English humor. The Koreans were very obsessed with this when I first arrived. It was like, “You need to realize that the Koreans might not find that funny.” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. But I think it is funny.” And people did laugh. A lot of jokes are funny because people know what it’s like to have a mother that nags them. I’m not sure if any of the jokes are jokes that I took straight from Chekhov. I wrote a play based on Korean society that brought in the plot elements of the original.
What was it like to work in Korea?
There’s this kind of reckless insanity. When I was rehearsing, we would go drinking pretty much every evening. I’d be the first to leave and it would be two o’clock in the morning or something and I’d be like, “I’ve got to go and work and I’ve got to be sleep enough to direct tomorrow.
And how do you think a New York audience is going to receive this work?
I think New York loves eating up cultural artifacts from elsewhere. This work is a kind of portal into the rest of the world, and I think that that is more essential than ever in America right now—where there might be a tendency toward a bit of isolationism—to have a city like New York going, “No, our eyes are looking outward.”
