Cultural Bridge to ‘Lost Angeles’ : Theater: The play attempts to aid understanding and introduce Korean-Americans to the community.

Every evening after work, two dozen Korean-Americans from many walks of life rush to a vacant office above the Jack in the Box restaurant in Koreatown where they transform themselves into actors.

After a quick meal of bulgogi (barbecue beef), spicy kimchi and rice, compliments of a Korean restaurant owner down the street, these business owners, accountants, insurance agents, college professors, homemakers and students dive into rehearsal, sometimes past midnight, for “Lost Angeles,” a play about a Korean-American grocer’s family.

The play, with 60% of its dialogue in Korean and 40% in English, runs Thursday through Sunday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center downtown.

The director and cast call the play a labor of love.

“We want to use the medium of the theater to introduce ourselves to the larger community,” said Suk Man Kim, director of “Lost Angeles,” adding that Korean-Americans have been too insulated from the mainstream and have stuck to their traditional belief that “silence is golden” for too long.

“If there is one thing we have learned from the Los Angeles riots, it is the need to express ourselves,” said Edward Chang, a UC Riverside ethnic studies professor. “Non-Koreans know so little about us.” Chang’s book, “Who African-Americans Are,” published earlier this year, inspired “Lost Angeles.”

The characters in “Lost Angeles,” like real-life Korean-Americans, struggle with the clashes of Korean and American cultures, conflicts between the first, second and the in-between “1.5” generation (those born in Korea but reared in the United States). They deal with the language barrier between Korean-born and American-born that makes communication difficult. They also struggle with their prejudices against other ethnic groups, especially African-Americans. And they search for meaning in lives that turned out to be so different from what they had dreamed when they immigrated to the United States.

In the play, Dongpal Chang and his wife, Samrye, have owned a convenience store in a black neighborhood for 20 years. It is burned down during the riots and they are on the verge of losing their home because of missed mortgage payments. They also must defend themselves in a civil suit brought by the family of a robbery suspect shot in their store. During another robbery, their daughter’s husband was killed by an African-American.

Emotionally and physically drained from the ordeal, Chang leaves home without telling anyone.

As family members try to locate Chang, they agonize over what might have caused the man to leave. When they look for Chang’s photograph to attach to flyers, they find only a family portrait taken 20 years earlier--an indication of how preoccupied they had been with their work to take time out for something as routine as taking pictures.

A son, Bruce, wonders if the fight he had with his father over not wanting to go to law school might have contributed to his departure. Daughter Grace feels guilty about “manipulating” her father by acting obedient, like a good Korean daughter, around him but doing as she pleased behind his back. Samrye doesn’t hesitate to put her son and daughter on a guilt trip, saying that her husband struggled all for the sake of his children.

The idea for “Lost Angeles” took hold not in Koreatown, but 7,000 miles away in Seoul late last year while Edward Chang was on a trip to get his book on African-Americans published. In Seoul, he looked up his old friend Suk Man Kim, who had returned to Korea after completing his studies in the United States and now heads the theater department at Chung Ang University.

Chang and Kim had worked in the amateur Korean theater group called MOIM (The Gathering) in Los Angeles in the late 1970s when they were both students.

After reading Chang’s book, Kim suggested that they do a play in Los Angeles.

“I felt an urgency to explain ourselves,” Kim said. Chang’s book explained African-Americans to Koreans, but who was going to explain who Koreans are and why they behave the way they do?

They enlisted Korean-American playwright So Hyun Chang, another friend from the MOIM days, who lives in Los Angeles. Since So Hyun Chang writes only in Korean, Kim and Edward Chang improvised and added dialogue in English.

“Dialogue reflects the way we Korean-Americans talk,” Chang said. “Kids may speak to parents in English but parents talk in Korean.”

Chang wrote his book on African-Americans to educate Koreans. “Koreans made a lot of gestures over the last decade. They gave scholarships, they held barbecues, they got involved in exchanges with African-American churches, but these things didn’t improve the relationships.

“That’s because while they were sincere and well-meaning, Korean immigrants really didn’t know how to deal with the African-American community.”

With this play, the group hopes to start a continuing cultural movement in the Los Angeles Korean community--the Korean equivalent of the Pan-Asian East West Players.

“We hope many non-Koreans will come,” Kim said of the play. “We assure them it will be a worthwhile 100 minutes they will spend.”

* Performances for “Lost Angeles” will be 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets $10 in advance, $12 at box office.