Julia Cho returns to South Coast Repertory with Aubergine, the Korean-American playwright’s deeply moving meditation on love, life, dying, death, family, memory … and the role that food plays in all of the above.

American-born chef Ray Park (Jinn S. Kim) has spent most of his thirty-eight years at odds with the penny-pinching, food-indifferent immigrant father (Sab Shimono) who raised him and now lies dying with only Ray and African hospice nurse Lucien (Irungu Mutu) to care for him in his final days.

Indeed, aside from his son, the elder Kim’s only remaining relative is the younger brother he left behind in Korea and has scarcely spoken to since emigrating to the U.S. in his early twenties, and were it not for Ray’s ex-girlfriend Cornelia’s (Jully Lee) reminder that he might want to let Uncle know about his brother’s illness, Ray might never have made the call that brings the younger Park brother (Bruce Baek) to America for a farewell visit.

If this seems a fairly straightforward narrative, it is as we follow Ray’s rekindled relationship with Cornelia (whose near-native command of the Korean language proves fortuitous), his newly-forged connection with an uncle he’s never known, and Lucien’s words of wisdom and comfort illuminating the way towards a father’s imminent death.

Or at least Aubergine’s narrative would be straightforward were it not for the fourth-wall-breaking food-and-memory-related monologs Cho sprinkles in along the way.

Ray recalls the meal he once cooked in a vain attempt to impress his father with expertise acquired at culinary school in France. Cornelia evokes memories of a mother so obsessed with cooking for her husband and daughter that Cornelia later opted to live on peanut butter, bread, crackers, anything that didn’t have to be cooked. Lucien remembers “soup” served in a refugee camp that made home-cooked meals seem little more than the stuff of dreams. And Uncle describes the meal his gifted cook of a mother made to bid her elder son farewell on his last night in Korea.

Put all this together and you come up with a play likely to resonate with anyone who’s ever suffered the loss of a loved one, and though it may hit a bit close to home for some, it’s a journey well worth taking.

Along the way, playwright Cho explores generation/culture gaps between American-reared children and their immigrant parents, and if she also inserts a couple of coincidental mulberry-and-pastrami-related bits of whimsy, it’s all part of a play that slowly but surely weaves its haunting spell.

Even a seemingly unrelated prologue (a woman with no connection to the Park family has her own food/memory/illness/death-related monolog to tell) pays off in the end, though I’ll leave it up to Cho to reveal just how.

Under Lisa Peterson’s nuanced direction, performances could not be finer, from Kim’s scruffily handsome, obstinately prickly Ray to a never-better Lee’s hard-edged but tender-hearted Cornelia to Mutu’s wise and caring Lucien to Baek’s Korean-speaking charmer of an Uncle.

As for Ray’s dad, though Shimono spends most of the play comatose, the esteemed stage-and-screen vet gets a still-vital flashback and his own heartbreaking monolog to deliver, while a luminous Joy DeMichelle sets Aubergine’s tone with Diane’s opening soliloquy, then returns for the most unexpectedly heart-rending of codas.

Completing Aubergine’s cast of characters, Luzma Ortiz delivers an effective cameo as the Hospital Worker who recommends that Ray consider home care while studiously avoiding the word hospice.

As always, South Coast Rep treats audiences to the most splendid of production designs: Myung Hee Cho’s mobile, multi-locale set and character-appropriate costumes, Peter Maradudin’s expressive lighting, and John Gromoda’s original music and sound design, with projection designer Yee Eun Nam both clarifying Cho’s script and providing simultaneous Korean-to-English translation when asked for.

Vanessa Cortez is assistant director. John Glore is dramaturg. Ben Shipley is stage manager, Margaret Kayes is assistant stage manager, and Hope Binfeng Ding and June Kim are stage management interns. Casting is by Joanne DeNaut, CSA.

From The Winchester House to Durango to The Language Archive to Office Hour (the latter two of which world premiered at South Coast Rep), Julia Cho has never failed to impress this reviewer, and her latest is no exception. Aubergine is as powerful, poignant, and soul-enriching a play as you’ll see all year.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
October 27. 2019
Photos: Jordan Kubat/SCR

Tags: Julia Cho, Orange County Theater Review, South Coast Repertory