Grove Theatre’s Director Finds Politics Alive in S. Korean Plays

An irony facing leaders of the embattled Grove Theatre Company is that the farther they get from Garden Grove, the more credibility they have. While the Garden Grove City Council has tried to shut down the company because of its cost and preference for Shakespeare over Neil Simon, arts leaders from Sacramento to Seoul have found merit in Orange County’s second-largest professional theater troupe.

Fresh from his battles with the City Council, Grove Managing Director Richard Stein headed off to South Korea from July 23 to Aug. 8, on a trip sponsored by New York’s International Theatre Institute of the United States and paid for by the U.S. Information Agency.

Stein, 35, who was selected because of his company’s efforts to reach the Korean community of Garden Grove, says that South Korean theater is an important part of the political, as well as cultural scene of that country.

He said he met with government officials, mainstream arts administrators and underground theater organizers during his 17-day trip.

In addition to seeing a spectrum of South Korean theater, Stein made contacts that may further the Grove Theatre Company’s international standing. Two South Korean theater professionals, actor Lee Seung Ho and lighting designer Kim Jung Ho, are tentatively scheduled to join the Grove company as visiting artists later this year, he said.

And despite the Grove company’s squabbles with the City Council, when it came to diplomacy, all was forgiven. The City Council made Stein an ambassador of sorts, and he carried a letter of introduction from Mayor J. Tilman Williams to the city fathers of Anyang, a community of 500,000 with which Garden Grove wishes to establish a sister city arrangement, Stein said.

“I wasn’t able to come back with a signed agreement,” Stein conceded, “but I noted strong sentiments on their part” in favor of the sister city deal and said that negotiations will continue.

Since most forms of government censorship were ended last summer, Stein said, Korean theater has grown enormously, touching on themes that were previously forbidden. Most compelling, he said, was a play called “Keumhee’s May,” about a 1980 disturbance in the town of Kwangju that Stein said was “the Kent State (killings) of (South) Korea.

“For seven years, all debate of the incident has been restrained by censorship,” he said. “Now that those limits have been lifted, it has become a hot political issue, which prompted the government to open an investigation. It also has opened up art.”

Stein said the play “is about the incident as seen through the eyes of a sister of a young man who is killed.”

“Keumhee’s May,” Stein said, was exemplary of the theater now taking over South Korea because of its mix of modern political and social issues with traditional Korean dramatic techniques.

“The play employs some of the traditional (Korean theatrical) drumming. That’s a part of the back-to-the-roots desire of the student activists there,” he said. “They want to back away from this technological monster the Republic of Korea has become.”

Stein said that while he is excited about the new topical direction of Korean theater, “there is a conflict between the political side and the artistic side” of the plays, and often political statements win out over artistic ingenuity.

Still, he said, “Keumhee’s May” “was well acted and well conceived as a theater piece except for its more extreme agitprop elements.”