Park Wan-suh tale gets theater treatment

Veteran actress Son Sook stars in monodrama ‘What I keep till the Very End’


Among the many short stories late author Park Wan-suh wrote, her 1994 piece “What I Keep till the Very End” is considered as one of her most personal works.

The story was written largely based on the author’s painful loss of her son in a car accident in 1988, just three months after his father’s death. He was 26 years old at the time and was attending a prestigious medical school in Seoul.

The novella is now being staged as a monodrama in Seoul, featuring veteran actress Son Sook in the lead role. The actress has previously starred in three monodramas in the past, including last year’s “Shirley Valentine.”

The piece begins as the protagonist talks to the wife of her husband’s older brother. The woman lost her son, who was attending a top university, seven years ago. Unlike Park’s real-life son, however, the novella’s character, Chang-hwan, was killed as he participated in a violent student protest in the 1980s.

Park, however, did not create a devoted, self-sacrificing mother character for the novella. The woman is clearly bitter, full of grudges, and at times shallow.

“I wasn’t jealous at all when I attended the wedding of my friend’s son,” she says.

“I mean, is he even comparable to Chang-hwan? He only got into that nameless university after taking the entrance exam three times. This young man has no ambition, no dream, and has only been interested in sleeping around. I’m sure one of the girls got pregnant and that’s why they got married so soon, even before finishing his degree.”

She also spends a great amount of time talking about how she is not jealous of her friends whose sons are successful.

“There’s nothing great about lawyers and prosecutors,” she says.

“I attended the trials of those who got arrested for participating in the pro-democracy movement. The prosecutors made some of the most ridiculous charges to somehow put them into jail. I openly jeered at them. So why would I be jealous of those young people who’ve just become prosecutors?”

One of the highlights of the play is when the woman talks about her recent visit to her friend, whose son is in a vegetative state. She starts sobbing as she confesses she was jealous of her friend, simply because her son was alive despite his hopeless condition.

Producer Yoo Seung-hee said she did not make many changes to the original text by Park. The novella is written entirely in the first person, and Son used it as the script for the 70-minute monodrama.

“There were some moments where I wanted to make it more dramatic,” said Yoo. “But I thought it was more appropriate to deliver the original text the way it was initially written.”

Son, who has done a number of monodramas in the past, said the current piece has been the toughest one to perform. “Memorizing the lines was certainly a challenge,” she said. “It was also challenging to voice Park’s extremely well-written sentences in a conversational way.”

“What I Keep till the Very End” runs until Sept. 23 at Chungmu Art Hall in Seoul. For tickets and information, call 3272-2334.

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)