Magic realism has never been my thing, and since Hannah And The Dread Gazebo relies on an abundance of it to tell the story of a 30something Korean-American’s visit to her parents’ homeland, I ended up unengaged by Jiehae Park’s overly fanciful comedy despite some terrific performances and a dazzling production design.

Pediatric neurologist Hannah (Monica Hong) has spent the past sixteen years of her post-high-school life getting ready to take her board-certification exams when a FedEx package drops out of the sky. (Don’t ask this to make sense. Magic realism means that things are likely to fall out of the sky.)

Attached to the package is a note written in Korean, only a few words of which Hannah can decipher, and inside it is a tiny bottle containing a tiny piece of rock.

Though it takes Hannah several attempts to get the message translated into English, it eventually turns out to be a suicide note written by her Alzheimer’s-suffering Korean grandmother, who’s thrown herself off the rooftop of the cutely-named Sunrise Dewdrop Apartment City For Senior Living, situated smack dab on the DMZ. (As for the piece of rock, well that turns out to be a “wish.” Go figure.)

And so Hannah heads off to Seoul to join her Korean-born parents (Hahn Cho’s Father and Janet Song’s Mother) and her all-American hipster younger brother Dang (Gavin Lee).

Before long, Dad is off meeting government officials in hopes of retrieving Mom’s body from the DMZ (that is assuming she died from the 63-story fall, which no one seems to know); Dang finds himself inexplicably able to understand an elderly Korean speaker’s folk tale (something about a bear and a tiger and a cave and garlic and animal excrement that ends with the line, “And that is how our country was born”); and the siblings’ mother is prattling on about trellises and gazebos, signs of depression and of playwright Park’s taste for whimsy.

Hannah And The Dread Gazebo’s most engaging scenes are those involving Dang and a quirky Korean-American Girl (Wonjung Kim) he meets on the Seoul subway (she recognizes him from a video his on-hiatus rock band New Tastier Glaze has posted on YouTube), eye-opening conversations revolving on how it feels to be a Korean-American (accent on American) back in the family homeland.

Still, if Dang’s baffling ability to understand the elderly local’s folk tale was an early indication that Hannah And The Dread Gazebo wasn’t trying to make logical sense, Park’s play lost me completely the moment Mother found herself hallucinating Adventures In The DMZ (the result of her own failed suicide attempt) and chatting with a woman with animal paws for hands.

As for what happens to Granny’s body, expect to go home as clueless as when her suicide note first arrived, though at the very least the entire cast returns for a Korean music video-style song and dance as compensation.

Director Jennifer Chang is blessed with a 100% Korean-American ensemble whose standouts are (Gavin) Lee and Jully Lee, the former giving Dang a goofy appeal that belies his Korean GQ-ready cheekbones, the latter a shape-shifting delight in a grand total of eight different roles, a number of them Korean-speaking.

Hannah And The Dread Gazebo does score straight A’s where production design is concerned, beginning with a scenic design by Yee Eun Nam that serves as a framework for some of the most spectacular video sequences in town. (Nam’s fantasy projections are the best part of Mother’s “trip.”)

Rebecca Bonebrake’s lighting, Howard Ho’s original music and sound design, Ruoxuan Li’s costumes, and Michael Allen Angel’s properties are all as good as it gets, with added snaps to magic consultant Dominik Krzanowski’s “How do they do that!” bits of magic.

Hannah And The Dread Gazebo’s California Premiere is produced for The Fountain Theatre in association with East West Players by James Bennett, Deborah Culver, Snehal Desai, Simon Levy, and Stephen Sachs. Bryan P. Clements is production stage manager and Scott Tuomey is technical director.

Theater genres are a matter of taste, and if magic realism is your thing, you may well take to Hannah And The Dread Gazebo in ways this reviewer did not. I for one would have preferred a good deal more realism and a lot less magic.

The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles.
www.FountainTheatre.com
www.EastWestPlayers.org

–Steven Stanley
August 18, 2019
Photos: Jenny Graham

Tags: East West Players, Fountain Theatre, Jiehae Park, Los Angeles Theater Review