Wild Goose Dreams wants to see itself, perhaps Evan Hansen-ily, as a play with some music about the difficulty of connection in our social media age. But that technology, despite its prominence in its score and set design, works only in service to what Wild Goose Dreams is really about: the complexities of relationships on the Korean peninsula, a place where some families have been divided for decades by the 38th Parallel and others are divided today by a hunger for English-language education that sends wives and children overseas.
This new play, which opened tonight at the Public Theater, in a Martinson Hall decked out with Seoul cityscapes, North Korean propaganda images, anime characters, and plenty of neon, centers on two lonely South Koreans and attempts to song-and-dance-ify the internet itself. The different pieces, each powerful on its own, yields a result that manages to be sometimes intriguing, occasionally heartbreaking, and not a little soporific.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★ review here.]
There’s Guk Minsung (Peter Kim), what Koreans call a “goose father,” a salaryman who has sent his family overseas for a better life, and lives as cheaply as possible to save money to send to them. The term is derived, as we learn both in the script and from Wikipedia, from the fact that geese are migratory birds, who, like goose fathers, must travel a great distance to see their families. (Do avian mishpucha not migrate together?) He tries to Facetime and Facebook message with his teenage daughter in Connecticut, who, like teenagers everywhere, wants little to do with him.
And then there’s Yoo Nanhee (Michelle Krusiec), a North Korean defector to the south, who can’t quite fit in in her new land and also desperately misses the father she left behind (and may have exposed to harm for her betrayal). She pays a broker to smuggle a cell phone to dad in the North, whom she may have put in danger by her betrayal, so that she can speak to him on a staticky connection. Two divided families, both trying to communicate via technology, both failing.
And, inevitably, two lonely, confused, and troubled people meeting on a dating site.
The script is by Hansol Jung, who was born in South Korea and weaves a traditional Korean folk tale into her story. There are quiet, fanciful moments, especially involving Nanhee’s visions of her father (played with a puckish charm by Francis Jue.) But she is also determined to put the internet on stage, using music and movement and the ensemble to portray the beeps, blips, alerts, and constant distractions of today’s online life.
Director Leigh Silverman — with the able assistance of composer Paul Castles, movement director Yasmine Lee, scenic designer Clint Ramos, and sound designer Palmer Hefferan — really does manage to make the internet come alive. It’s a little bit Evan Hansen, sure, but it works.
Except that it soon starts to seem beside the point. What is ultimately troubling Minsung and Nanhee isn’t the internet; it’s their partitioned lives. The trouble isn’t that technology is keeping them from making connections; it’s that even the best technology can’t hurdle thousands of miles, or a DMZ.
And that, ultimately — and despite another internet cameo — is what proves tragic for Minsung and Nanhee.
When Wild Goose Dreams is best is when it’s examining those problems, telling that human story, examining the faults in a seemingly happily neon-lit culture. By the end of the play, a Korean-American young woman sitting behind me was sobbing. For the purposes of this story, the distractions of the internet are just a distraction.
Wild Goose Dreams opened November 14, 2018, at the Public Theater and runs through December 16. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
