Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated even under the best of circumstances. When you add adoption, a language barrier, and years of estrangement into the mix – well, you get more baggage than a flight from Sydney to Seoul.
You may be familiar with Michelle Lim Davidson from both the stage (The Feather in the Web) and screen (The Newsreader, Utopia, Play School). In Koreaboo, her moving playwriting debut presented by Griffin Theatre Company in association with Belvoir St Theatre, Davidson draws on her own life to investigate the complexities of intercountry adoption, and the precarious experience shared by many adopted children – living caught between two very different cultures, but feeling like they belong to neither.
Davidson plays Hannah, a 30-something-year-old woman who was adopted from Korea as a baby and grew up in Newcastle. After a break-up, she travels to Korea to spend time with her biological mother, Umma (Heather Jeong). Hannah’s plan is to spend time getting to know the woman whose love she’s longed for since before she can remember. She offers to help Umma at the family’s convenience mart, and Umma reluctantly agrees. It’s not until they discover a shared love of K-pop and performing that Umma’s walls start falling down, and Hannah really gets to know her Sex-and-the-City-quoting, Turtle-Chip-eating Umma.
Jeong portrays the cheeky, sassy, larger-than-life Umma with apparent ease, and her command of movement, language and voice is a strong counter to Davidson’s Hannah. Rooted by Davidson’s simple, rhythmic writing, the actors’ chemistry steadily builds to hilarity.
As an audience, we come to expect Umma’s predictable TV quotations and funny one-liners, which are more endearing than painful. Meanwhile, Davidson’s performance drives the story forwards; she is watchable, funny and relatable as the confused 30-something stuck between two cultures. With every rejection and small insult from Umma, we see Hannah’s heart break a little, before she pulls herself together and keeps banging at the door, begging her mum to let her in. Davidson’s performance is layered, through the present-day Hannah we are also introduced to glimpses of the tiny baby taken from Korea, the 12-year-old tap eisteddfod winner, and the lost young woman struggling to learn Korean.
Much of the action takes place inside the convenience mart, and designer Mel Page has crafted an intricately detailed shop complete with cup noodles, stacks of spam, 2-for-1 specials, fake flowers and Gochujang. The set is simple but adaptable, and like a real convenience store, it’s got everything – a living room to watch HBO, a bar to sip soju, a runway to try out the latest Korean fashion, and boiling hot water to cook noodles.
Costumes are simple but effective, bedazzled sunglasses and aprons and cute-but-sexy Korean dresses highlight differences between Korean and Australian beauty standards. Lighting designer Kate Baldwin got the fluorescents memo, washing the stage in the familiar harsh white of convenience stores all over the world. With the mart open 24-hours, time of day is irrelevant, so the passing of time is instead punctuated by dance numbers, shop deliveries, and late-night TV shows.
In telling this story, Davidson shines fresh light on an under-represented diasporic experience. In her Playwright’s Note, she tells us that “since the 1950s, over 200,000 Korean children have been sent abroad for adoption… despite being the largest group of intercountry adoptees in Australia… our stories have remained largely unexplored.”
Hannah thinks that spending time with her mum will answer the hundreds of questions she’s carried her whole life – the biggest of them all being that ol’ universal chestnut: who am I?
It’s only natural to think that meeting a lost parent will provide you with the missing piece of the puzzle that is life. And while parents are ideally meant to be sources of comfort, guidance and connection; they can also be complicated, argumentative, and the cause of endless frustration. It can be a truly rude awakening to realise that parents aren’t perfect, and they don’t have all the answers.
Umma insists that Hannah has had a good life in Australia – she attended university, took dance lessons, and didn’t have to work in the mart as a child. For Hannah – who is still reckoning with the complexities of what was, what wasn’t, and what could have been – it’s a little more complicated than that. But as we witness these two women get to know one another, we are reminded that parenting doesn’t stop when we turn eighteen. Just because we grow up, build careers, fall in love, and raise our own families, it doesn’t mean we stop needing a hug from Mum.
Koreaboo is playing Downstairs at Belvoir St Theatre, Surry Hills, until July 20. You can find tickets & info at griffintheatre.com.au.
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