Theatre in Review: Did You Eat? (Ma-Yi Theater/Public Theater)

	Zoe Kim. Photo: Emma Zordan

The solo piece Did You Eat? is the first entry in Zoe Kim's proposed trilogy about hunger, and it begins on a wryly amusing note, as she translates her mother's "love language," in which deeper concerns are shrouded in gustatory terms. Thus, "Food?" means "How are you?" "Are you eating?" really means "I'm worried about you." "Want food?" is her way of saying "I'm sorry." It's a charming and touching observation, and, for all we know, the entire show will consist of such warmly recalled memories.

Although Did You Eat? is most assuredly about hunger, however, food has little or nothing to do with it. It's a portrait of emotional starvation so brutal that one can barely credit that Kim, who endured it, stands before us and not an institution somewhere. As she tells it, the disaster of her childhood is written into her DNA. Her Korean mother, wanting nothing more than to be a scientist, is railroaded into marriage by her parents, who see no other role for a young woman. When she becomes pregnant, it is universally agreed that her job is to produce a male heir. Upping the stakes: Her husband is the only survivor of 13 children; raised amid terrible privation, his sisters were effectively allowed to die so that all available resources could be reserved for him.

But, instead of a boy, little Zoe is born, and her parents' marriage is functionally over. Zoe grows up with a resentful mother and a father who is, alternately, distant and physically abusive. The details are positively grisly; if presented as fictional, one might find them impossibly melodramatic. When her parents take up separate residences, Zoe doesn't understand that their marriage is over; she merely accepts the explanation that "living in two different homes is like living in two rooms that are really far apart." This makes for considerable awkwardness when her father produces his second wife. Later, Zoe's mother sends her to a boarding school in America. But her father comes after her, abducting her to a motel where he beats her senseless, apparently with the intention of murdering her. A desperate phone call to her mother is worse than useless ("He's your father," she is told. "You'll be fine. Be a good daughter.") and she barely escapes with her life. Later, he cuts her and her mother off financially, and both spiral down in spectacular ways.

Zoe survives by adopting an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome, never learning to question her grim circumstances. In a line that could come from Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, she notes, "Noon-chi, the ability to listen and gauge others' moods, becomes [her] superpower." Quoting the poet Lauren Eden, she adds, "When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off of knives." It's putting it mildly to say that she must lick a frightening number of knives to live another day.

Only a fearless performer could lay bare the awful facts of her upbringing, and Kim's understated, unemotional delivery serves to highlight its horror. Alternating between the first and second person -- she often speaks directly to a glowing orb -- she seemingly addresses her nascent self, preparing her for the rough road ahead. It's an interesting approach, and, possibly, an undermining one as well. For all the horrors unsentimentally recalled, Did You Eat? is not a particularly reflective piece of work. It is a child's view of an appalling situation, long on the details of suffering and short on context and insight.

Kim implies that her dire family situation is rooted in a toxic intersection of patriarchal Korean culture and her parents' emotional damage; fair enough, but, after scene upon scene of stunning cruelty and criminal behavior, one yearns to understand better how her parents get away with it. For example, after that near-fatal motel episode, her father drops her off at her school and drives away; does no one notice her damage? Back in Korea, a school counselor, noting Zoe's request for anti-anxiety drugs, tries to intervene, but her mother successfully portrays her daughter as a liar, and the matter is dropped.

Other passages are too sketchy to make an impact. An amusing passage features Zoe, in boarding school, struggling to make sense of American slang. But what she really learns while living here is "how dehumanized and dismissed I feel, how invisible and misplaced I am, how my body is no more than someone's fetish, how my almond eyes and golden skin could get me killed, how the model minority myth denies me the right to be outraged. And how, it turns out, the American dream favors the privileged." That's a very big statement, and it would be nice if she backed it up with a vivid anecdote or two.

Did You Eat? becomes even harder to credit as Zoe descends into a near-feral existence, only to be rescued by the love of a good man who stands by her over the course of a decade, eventually marrying her. But was this all it took to turn her life around? A follow-up passage, about the healing effects of owning a dog, comes off as borderline saccharine in this context. The piece ends powerfully, as Zoe makes fateful decisions about both her parents that allow her to move forward at last. But, for all its admirable qualities in recounting a life pulled back from the brink, the script raises more questions than it answers.

Chris Yejin's elegant, well-paced staging is an enormous help, as is the production design. Tanya Orellana's set, consisting of various rectangles, is a fine surface for Yee Eun Nam's projections of, among other things, English and Korean phrases, a black-and-white US flag, cartoons, and abstract arrangements of faces and hands. Minjoo Kim's lighting is sensitively calibrated to the piece's mood shifts; one unusual touch involves wash effects from units built into the audience seating. Tae Jong Park's sound design includes guitar music, Korean pop, and a rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," in addition to kids playing, applause, and airplane engines. Harriet Jung has dressed Kim attractively and appropriately.

But a sixty-five-minute running time is not enough to contain material that could conceivably support three or four solo pieces -- about her parents, her marriage, finding her way as a writer, and the unique interactions between people and their animals. Or maybe there's a way to get it all into a longer version of this piece. As it is, Did You Eat? is both fascinating and frustrating, a gripping tale of survival that outsays its welcome even as one longs to know more about its indomitable creator. --David Barbour