Hansol Jung | |
---|---|
Born | Jeonju, South Korea |
Occupation | |
Language | English Korean |
Education | Pennsylvania State University Yale University (MFA) |
Genre | Dramatic literature |
Notable works | |
Notable awards | Whiting Award (2018) |
Hansol Jung is a South Korean translator and playwright. Jung is a recipient the Whiting Award in drama and three of her plays were listed on the 2015 Kilroys' List. Jung is a member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers' Lab and was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. In addition to writing several plays, Jung has also written for the television series Tales Of the City .
At age six, Jung and her family moved to apartheid-era South Africa. [1] At age 13, Jung and her family returned to South Korea. [1] At age 20, Jung studied abroad as an exchange student at New York University; three years later, she moved to the United States. [2] Jung began an MFA in musical theatre directing at Pennsylvania State University, before transferring to receive an MFA in playwriting from the Yale School of Drama. [3] Jung graduated from Yale in 2014. [1]
Jung has translated over thirty English-language musicals into Korean, including Spamalot , Dracula , The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee , and Evita . She has also worked as a theatre director and lyricist in South Korea. [4] [5]
In 2015, Jung participated in a residency at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, where she developed her play Cardboard Piano . [6] That year, Jung was one of three playwrights to be selected for the New York Theatre Workshop's 2050 Fellowship. [7] Jung was the 2016 Playwriting Fellow at Page 73 Theatre. While working at Page 73, Jung developed three plays: Wolf Play, Wild Goose Dreams, and an untitled play about drugs. [8] Jung is also a member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers' Lab. [9]
Jung's plays Cardboard Piano, No More Sad Things, and Wolf Play were all listed on the 2015 Kilroys' List, which recognizes excellence in un-produced or rarely produced works by women, transgender, and non-binary playwrights. Jung was the playwright with the most plays on the list that year. [10] Wild Goose Dreams was listed on the 2016 Kilroys' List. [11]
For the 2019/20 academic year at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Jung was one of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows and the only playwright of the five artists. During the Hodder Fellowship, Jung worked on her audio-feed play Window House. [12]
In 2020, Jung was commissioned by Alliance Theatre to write an adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as part of their Classic Remix Project. [13] A reading of this adaptation occurred online with Two River Theatre in 2020. In April 2023, the adaptation was staged at Two River. [14] [15] It had a run off-Broadway in 2023 with the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), featuring an all Asian cast. [16] In 2024, an audio-version of this adaptation was released by Portland's Play On Shakespeare. [17]
Jung participated in the 24 Hour Plays project in March 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown. Jung wrote the monologue "Cocktail Class" which was then performed by Ashlie Atkinson. [18] [19] A year later, the Jung wrote a second play for the project to celebrate the one-year anniversary. [20] Jung was commissioned to create work for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and the Telephonic Literary Union's telephone theatrical event, Human Resources. [21]
In 2022, New York's Tripwire Harlot Press announced they would be releasing a collected edition of some of Jung's works as part of their "Sledgehammer Series," which aims to publish more plays by writers of colour. Jung's volume is titled Doodles from the Margins: Three Plays and will feature Wolf Play, No More Sad Things, and Wild Goose Dreams and will include doodles and notes from Jung in the margins. [22] [23]
Jung was part of the entirely LGBT writing staff of the 2019 Netflix miniseries Tales Of The City . Jung wrote the series' third episode, "Happy, Now?". [24] In 2021, Jung was selected to be a participant in the Writers Guild of America, East's first Showrunner Academy program. [25] She was also a writer for the 2022 Apple TV+ show, Pachinko . Jung is writing a television adaptation of C Pam Zhang's novel How Much of These Hills is Gold . [26] [27]
Among the Dead was the first play Jung wrote, which she also used to apply for the Yale School of Drama. [8] The plot of the play spans a total of 30 years and explores legacy, impact, and experiences of the Korean 'comfort women' of World War II. [28] [29] Among the Dead premiered at HERE with the Ma-Yi Theatre Company in November 2016. [30]
Cardboard Piano is a two-act play set in Uganda. The first act takes place on the eve of the new millennium when two teenage girls, one American and one Ugandan, perform a makeshift wedding only to be interrupted by a child soldier. The second act takes place on their 'wedding' anniversary in 2014 and follows the American as she returns to Uganda. [31] Cardboard Piano premiered the 2016 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. [2] The premiere was directed by Leigh Silverman. [1]
No More Sad Things follows a 42-year-old tourist in Maui who becomes romantically involved with a 15 year old. [32] No More Sad Things co-premiered in November 2015 at Sideshow Theatre in Chicago, Illinois and Boise Contemporary Theatre in Boise, Idaho. [33] Hansol Jung's brother, Jongbin, co-wrote music for the play with Hansol. [34]
Wild Goose Dreams is a love story between a North Korean defector, Nanhee, and Minsung, a South Korean Goose-father, who meet online. [35] [36] Jung wrote the first thirty pages in Korean before translating them into English. [37] Wild Goose Dreams premiered in 2017 at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego under the direction of Leigh Silverman. [38]
Wolf Play is about a Korean boy who is adopted in American and is "re-homed" after the original adoptive parents have a biological baby. He is then "second-chance-adopted" by a lesbian couple. In the play, the boy, Jeenu, believes himself to be a wolf but is really a puppet. [39] Jung was inspired to write Wolf Play after reading a news article about Facebook and Yahoo groups used by some adoptive parents to re-home their adopted children, usually from other countries. [40] Wolf Play premiered in March 2019 at the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon. [41]
Merry Me is a queer sex comedy that plays with and references 17th century restoration comedies, Angels in America, Sappho, and Euripedes, among others. [42] [43] It follows Lieutenant Shane Horne, who attempts to convince the others on her naval base that her therapist's conversion therapy, invented by Horne, has turned her straight in a riff off The Country Wife, so she can spend time with married women. [44] Merry Me premiered off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2023 under the direction of Leigh Silverman. [45]
Writer:
Year | Award | Category | Work | Results | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2014 | Ruby Prize | No More Sad Things | Nominated | [46] | |
2017 | Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting | Won | [47] | ||
2018 | Whiting Award | Drama | Won | [48] | |
2020 | Steinberg Playwright Award | Won | [49] | ||
2023 | Lucille Lortel Awards | Outstanding Play | Wolf Play | Nominated | [50] |
2023 | Lambda Literary Award | Drama | Wolf Play | Finalist | [51] |
2024 | Obie Awards | Playwrighting | Wolf Play (MCC Theater | Soho Rep | Ma-Yi Theater Company) | Won | [52] |
Michelle Jacqueline Krusiec is an American actress, writer and producer.
Sheila Callaghan is a playwright and screenwriter who emerged from the RAT movement of the 1990s. She has been profiled by American Theater Magazine, "The Brooklyn Rail", Theatermania, and The Village Voice. Her work has been published in American Theatre magazine.
Francis Jue is an American actor and singer. Jue is known for his performances on Broadway, in national tours, Off-Broadway and in regional theatre, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area and at The Muny in St. Louis. His roles in plays and musicals range from Shakespeare to Rodgers and Hammerstein to David Henry Hwang. He is also known for his recurring role on the TV series Madam Secretary (2014–2019).
Jang Young-nam is a South Korean actress. She began her career as an acclaimed actress in theater, then transitioned to supporting roles on television and film, notably in works by director Jang Jin. A member of Jang Jin's Division 장진사단, she regularly appears in his films and theater company productions. She became one of the original cast members of the live sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live Korea when Jang Jin brought the American show to South Korea. In addition, she was a member of the Korean theater troupe Mokhwa Repertory Company.
Jung Dong-hwan is a South Korean actor. Jung began his career in theater, then was most active in Korean cinema in the 1980s, with leading roles in Late Autumn (1982), Jung-kwang's Nonsense (1986), and A Top Knot on Montmartre (1987). As he grew older, Jung appeared more frequently in television, notably in The Last Station (1987), Three Kim Generation (1998), Winter Sonata (2002), Rustic Period (2002), Immortal Admiral Yi Sun-sin (2004) and Freedom Fighter, Lee Hoe-young (2010).
Leigh Silverman is an American director for the stage, both off-Broadway and on Broadway. She was nominated for the 2014 and 2024 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for the musicals Violet and Suffs, and the 2008 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Play for the play From Up Here.
The Kilroys' List is a gender parity initiative to end the "systematic underrepresentation of female and trans playwrights" in the American theater industry. Gender disparity is defined as the gap of unproduced playwrights' whose plays are being discriminated against based on the writer's gender identification and intersectional identities of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, and ability. Recent statistical research released in November 2015, entitled The Count, gathered that 22% of total surveyed professional productions from 2011-2013 annual seasons were written by women playwrights, 3.8% of the total were written by women playwrights of color, and 0.4% of the total were written by foreign women playwrights of color. 78% of total surveyed professional productions were written by men playwrights.
Kim Sun-young is a South Korean actress. She has performed in a variety of popular dramas, including Reply 1988 (2015), Because This is My First Life (2018), Romance is a Bonus Book (2019), When the Camellia Blooms (2019), Vagabond (2019), Crash Landing On You (2019), and Backstreet Rookie (2020). She won the Best Supporting Actress award at the Chunsa Film Art Awards and Wildflower Film Awards for her performance in Communications and Lies. Kim has received the Best Supporting Actress Award at the 56th Baeksang Arts Awards for her role on Crash Landing On You.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright.
Larissa FastHorse is a Native American playwright and choreographer based in Santa Monica, California. In 2023, she became the first known female Native American playwright produced on Broadway with The Thanksgiving Play at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater. That same year, she joined Arizona State University as a professor of practice in the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Department of English with long-time collaborators, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe. In 2024, Peter Pan: The Broadway Musical with an adapted book by FastHorse began an international tour.
Jocelyn Bioh is a Ghanaian-American writer, playwright and actor. She graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in English and got her master's degree in Playwriting from Columbia University. Jocelyn's Broadway credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. She has performed in regional and off-Broadway productions of An Octoroon, Bootycandy and For Colored Girls. She has written many of her own plays that have been produced in national and collegiate theaters. Some of her more well-known works include Nollywood Dreams and School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. Bioh is a playwright with Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and Atlantic Theater Company, is a resident playwright at Lincoln Center and is a 2017-18 Tow Playwright-in-Residence with MCC. She is a writer on the Hulu show Tiny Beautiful Things.
Martyna Majok is a Polish-born American playwright who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living. She emigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New Jersey. Majok studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School. Her plays are often politically engaged, feature dark humor, and experiment with structure and time.
Yeom Hye-ran is a South Korean actress, with a portfolio of film, television, and theatre performances. Yeom began her career in theater in 1999 and made her screen debut in 2003. She has since played supporting roles in film and television, notably Dear My Friends, Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (2016), I Can Speak, The Most Beautiful Goodbye (2017), Life (2018), When the Camellia Blooms, Innocent Witness (2019), Chocolate (2019–2020), The Uncanny Counter (2020–2023), The Glory (2022–2023), and Mask Girl (2024).
Jeon Mi-do is a South Korean actress and singer. She debuted as ensemble cast in musical Mr. Mouse in 2006. She later made a name for herself by appearing in famous works such as the musical Finding Kim Jong-wook, Doctor Zhivago, and Maybe Happy Ending. In 2015, she won the Best Actress Award at the 9th The Musical Awards, and in 2018, she won the Best Actress Award at the 2nd Korean Musical Awards.
Janine Nabers is an American playwright and television writer.
Cardboard Piano is a 2016 American play by Hansol Jung. It premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays.
Kim Dong-yeon (Korean: 김동연), a South Korean playwright and theater director, is also known as the Blue Chip Director of Daehak-ro. He made his directorial debut in 2003 with the play "Fantasy Fairy Tale." One of his most famous works as a director is the South Korean musical Maybe Happy Ending, which premiered in 2017. Kim is also recognized for his military musicals The Shinheung Military Academy (2018) and Return (2019). Additionally, he has directed the South Korean adaptations of stage plays such as Human (2010), The Pride (2014), M. Butterfly (2017), Shakespeare R&J (2018), and Touching the Void (2022).
Susan Soon He Stanton is an American playwright, television writer, and screenwriter. Stanton was a producer and writer for HBO's Succession, for which she won Emmy, WGA, and Peabody Awards. She has also written for The Baby, Modern Love, Dead Ringers, and Conversation with Friends.
Gab Reisman is an American playwright, director, and immersive theatre maker. Her plays examine issues of cultural geography and identity, often incorporating humor and elements of the surreal.
Erika Dickerson-Despenza is an American playwright. She won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2021 for her play, cullud wattah.