gordsellar

I know I’ve been extremely lax in posting here since, well, since the beginning. And I have been even worse at commenting on others’ posts. But anyway, this seemed like the right place to post this. Apologies to those who saw it when I first posted it, I can’t seem to find the draft save function in this interface and ended up saving this post to the main page unfinished.

The short version is that I’ve written a bilingual stage play for teachers to perform for children. All the speaking parts save the narrator’s are in Korean, and the Narrator speaks in English. There’s a link for the script beneath the fold in this entry, and if you feel like reading a goofy bilingual play in Korean, you can go ahead and download it and read it for yourself.

Now for the long version: while I was working on planning this year’s Elementary-Level Summer English Camp at my University, we were talking about how to change Drama Day. The eventual consensus was that having the kids sit through fewer of their peers’ plays, and in a better location, would be a major help. (Which, in fact, it was.) But this left an hour of programming on drama day. I had the idea to have teachers perform a play, and was kicking around the possibility of us doing one in Korean.

But you know, a real Korean stage play would probably have been far too hard for us, and not really designed for Korean learners. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to choose or, even, where to begin looking for a book of plays in Korean. But mainly, I dismissed it as probably too hard. Yet we agreed that having the teachers perform a play in Korean would be a great thing for those kids to see: it could drive home that making mistakes was alright; that speaking another language is, we all acknowledge, difficult at first; and, of course, it would be cool to see teachers who have never studied any other language themselves suddenly struggling to learn this lines and perhaps getting a little insight into what their students go through. (The only person who spoke English throughout the play was the Narrator, who was a Korean Teaching Assistant, so it was fully a second-language only play.)

So I took the Nolbu/Heungbu legend—the story about the magic pumpkin—and mangled it beyond all recognition. Instead of a poor little swallow with a broken wing, Heungbu met a seagull with a broken wing. Instead of a magical pumpkin providing all the goodies, Heungbu (and later Nolbu) met a singing, dancing, magical “tractor” (경운기), and instead of Tokaebi (goblins), Nolbu is punished by an encounter with gangsters.

The play is full of rather awful puns, and relies very heavily on occasional Narratorial interjections which explain plot; but that said, it was performed without much problem after about 5 rehearsals by a group of foreigners who’d never done a play in Korean before, and many of whom speak not much Korean to begin with. (Okay, Heungbu needed cheat sheets, but then again, he had the most lines and he did a good job, when all is said and done.) Let me just say that across language and culture barriers, slapstick humor is an amazing tool. So are men in drag, and men in drag hitting men not-in-drag.

Anyway, I may revise the file, but I’m a little bit excited so I’m posting a link to it. I’m sure some typos remain, but overall I’m considering it, besides such little edits, as being in final form. Here’s a link to the file, hosted on my own site. As my girlfriend said, it’s a kind of summary of all I’ve learned to date in Korean, and seems to have succeeded as a self-imposed kick in the pants to get back into studying again.

I hope it’s entertaining, anyway.

EDIT: Oh, and by the way: I did have my girlfriend Lime as well as one of the TAs look over different parts of the play for typos or mistakes in my Korean, as well as malapropisms and things that could be said more idiomatically. However, I’m sure some glitches remain. If you see anything, you can feel free to note it in the comments, and I would appreciate it.

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