'I can't be indifferent to anyone who carries vulnerability' [Interview]

Playwright Seo Dong-min on 'Pen and Sword,' 'Ong Ong Ong'

'Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick' opens Friday

Beyond queer and feminist themes,

a solidarity that endures difference

A scene from the play "Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick" [Provided by Gongnoliclub]

Sailor Moon lived in the hearts of the girls of the 1990s. Playwright Seo Dong-min, born in 1991, reaches back to that world in "Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick" — her debut-defining work — through two protagonists who are at once siblings and sisters.

"I'm sorry for not being honest with you … " (from "Moonlight Legend," the theme song of the anime series Sailor Moon)

Gyubin and Eunbin once sang "Moonlight Legend" together as children — "If this moment is a dream, I'll quietly draw near to you and confess everything." The duet they reprise as grown adults, each carrying secrets too heavy to speak and feelings too buried to surface, aches with private histories. What was the transformation they once dreamed of, the wish they had carried so long, that its weight could feel this sorrowful?

Sailor Moon functions as a kind of symbol in the play. Seo explains that in adolescence, whether a young person watched robot-driven boys' comics or shows like Sailor Moon and Wedding Peach was itself a marker of queerness.

"For queer teenagers, 'magical girl' transformation stories weren't appealing simply because the characters became glamorous and pretty," she said. "The transformation was a symbol of another self within you finally emerging." She added that she wanted to capture "the happiest memory of two sisters sitting in front of the television — in a childhood when I had no idea what was happening in the family, and no idea things would turn out the way they did."

Playwright Seo Dong-min [Provided by Doosan Art Center]

Seo's stage work fixes its gaze on the fractures that push through the surface of ordinary life: a wife who finally finds herself in front of a fake husband ("Ong Ong Ong"); a female writer who defies the long-standing rules of the martial-arts world to take up a sword ("Pen and Sword"); a family that can only face each other's circumstances after crossing a threshold of secrets ("Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick"). Widely regarded as a singular voice in contemporary Korean theater, Seo has had an unusually packed year. Named a DAC Artist by Doosan Art Center and deep in work on a new piece, she has also staged "Pen and Sword," "A Heart That Doesn't Age" and "Ong Ong Ong" — works she had long carried — and is now preparing the revival of "Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick" (Friday through Oct. 25, Mapo Art Center), which sold out at its premiere, won the Young Theater Award at the 2024 Baeksang Arts Awards and received a special jury prize at the Seoul Arts Award.

Meeting Seo recently at Seoul Arts Center, she said she wants "to have a conversation with the audience through the real stories that emerge when characters step just one pace out of their assigned places — without lecturing them."

Queer, feminist, every minority story: 'I can't be indifferent'

The year is 2010, and the place is Susaek-dong, Eunpyeong-gu, Seoul. A family lives in a worn multi-unit house slated for redevelopment: a rough-edged grandmother, a mother fixated entirely on her son, a brother named Gyubin who soaks up every drop of the family's favoritism, and a 20-year-old daughter named Eunbin who has just been accepted to a dental school in the provinces and is counting the days until she can leave. Then one day a peach-scented lipstick keeps going missing. Eunbin tells herself it is not him — but she suspects her brother, who has always worn his hair long and loved Sailor Moon since childhood.

The stage opens onto what feels like a real interior of a Susaek-dong row house. The neighborhood name came from the playwright's own memory.

"I used to live in Susaek-dong, Eunpyeong-gu," she said with a laugh. "Writing down that specific place made it easier to immerse myself, since it was somewhere I actually grew up." The setting she built around that memory became the invisible skeleton of the work. "Gyubin's family had one ultimate strategy: just wait for the redevelopment to come through," she said. Before the era of skyrocketing real estate prices, the dream of redevelopment — more coveted than a lottery win — was what each family member clung to as they endured their own particular hardships.

The circumstances surrounding the siblings are drawn from a reality many will recognize. Think gender discrimination between sons and daughters was a thing of the past by the 2010s? Think again. Seo noted that at her university, "girls almost never repeated a year to retake the college entrance exam." In the play, after Eunbin loses her part-time job because of something her brother did, she confronts him: "You cause the trouble, and I'm the one who gets fired. You get to repeat the year at home with the family's support, while I'm barely scraping by with part-time work just to afford the same chance."

Seo writes primarily about people and situations that appear to sit slightly outside the mainstream — but she does so from an angle that refuses to turn them into objects of observation. Queer identity ("Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick"), feminism ("Pen and Sword") and aging ("A Heart That Doesn't Age") stand at the center of her work, each serving as an urgent lens through which to examine the hierarchies and exclusions of contemporary life. "I think of queer feminism as my own problem," she said. "When I studied it in university, I felt like I had found the field of knowledge that explained my own life." Her concerns have since expanded further.

"I believe that anyone who feels they carry some form of vulnerability cannot look away from the vulnerability of others," she said. "We can stand in solidarity with each other, or we can fight each other more fiercely — but we cannot simply turn away with indifference."

The principles by which Seo builds her characters are layered. She believes a character only becomes fully three-dimensional when contradictions coexist along both axes — what she describes as the X and Y of a person: "planting something unlikable and something lovable in the same character at the same time." Alongside that, she places characters side by side, each carrying a personal history that cannot be weighed on a single scale — refusing to lean on what she calls "a standardized victimhood." Eunbin, the long-suffering daughter who has given everything to her brother, and Gyubin, who has quietly suppressed himself precisely because the family's expectations all fell on him, are both examples of this. What Seo builds in her work are stories that reach beyond familiar representations.

A scene from the play "Pen and Sword" [Provided by Park Taeyang]

"When mainstream media depicts sexual minorities, it often centers their story on romance with men," she said. "But I kept thinking: that's not all there is to what they experience. The relationships between women — not just what happens in relation to men — feel like the more pressing conversation right now."

Even as she takes on subjects that resist easy categorization, her work never loses its humor. She describes herself as someone who genuinely loves comedy, and her plays move audiences through cycles of laughter and tears — the kind of laughter that comes from recognition, not embarrassment. She is careful, she says, to avoid humor that works by putting someone down or making them the butt of a joke. "You need laughter to keep an audience in their seats for 100 minutes, but I try to stay alert to whether the easy laughs are propping up existing power dynamics," she said. That caution led her to cut a line from the scene where Gyubin puts on stockings. The original line was: "Hey, your leg hair is sticking out." Audiences laughed — but she decided the line, reminiscent of an old-fashioned comedy sketch, could be hurtful or offensive to some, and removed it.

Writing fueled by 'anger and frustration,' reaching toward genuine solidarity

Seo's path into the theater did not follow the conventional route through literary institutions. She majored in Korean literature and completed a graduate degree, but her résumé took an unusual detour through a major educational textbook publisher and a martial-arts fiction company. It was at her twin brother's suggestion — he is a doctor — that she enrolled in an academy course and wrote her first 10-minute one-act play. She later co-founded the theater collective Dam with fellow playwrights Park Ju-young and Gu Hana, and the three relentlessly knocked on the doors of staged readings, showcases and support programs. The first drafts of both "Dried Chili and Peach-Scented Lipstick" and "Pen and Sword" were written during the pandemic, while she was active with Dam. "Dried Chili" went on to be selected for the National Theater Company of Korea's creative development program and underwent four years of development before its official premiere in 2024.

In barely five or six years, she has produced a steady stream of new work. The primal energy driving her writing, she reflects, is "frustration and anger" — a recurring despair rooted in the fear, felt both within the family and in society at large, that "no one will fully believe what I say." But she does not let that anger harden into a slogan.

A scene from the play "A Heart That Doesn't Age" [Provided by Sagaetamsa Theater Company]

"If you say 'be filial to your parents' in a single sentence online, 90 out of 100 people will nod along. But 'there are things even parents cannot be forgiven for' — that cannot be argued in one sentence. You have to show the scenes. The context has to accumulate layer by layer. That's why, if I'm writing a full-length 100-minute play, I want to tell a story that actually needs those 100 minutes."

She describes herself as "the type who is angry at the world — a social activist at heart," yet she is wary of using storytelling to lecture others, and she rejects hierarchies within narrative itself. "I don't agree with the distinction that says history makes for grand, important stories, while gender issues or everyday life make for small ones," she said. It is precisely this refusal that allows her to excavate social contradictions from a kitchen corner in a Susaek-dong row house or the margins of a martial-arts fiction shop.

Seo's gaze has not stayed fixed on contemporary domestic drama — it has pushed boldly into martial-arts fiction and classical literature. "Pen and Sword," staged in July at Yeohaengja Theater with director Park Ju-young, drew directly on the absurd working conditions she experienced at a martial-arts fiction company and delivered a sharp rebuke to the genre's entrenched bias that women are constitutionally incapable of mastering advanced combat skills.

"In martial-arts fiction, characters can fly through the air — and yet there's a genre convention that women are physically incapable of surpassing men in combat," she said. "Drawing a line because women have less physical strength is a stubbornness among fans of the genre. It is not some sacred law that must never change."

The story weaves between the world inside a martial-arts novel and the real world, picking apart the unequal distribution of opportunity between men and women. "Just as the chance to pick up a sword within the martial-arts world was given only to certain characters, I wanted to say that in society too, the act of women writing has been subtly and persistently undermined," Seo said. She found much to identify with in Joanna Russ's critical work "How to Suppress Women's Writing," and through a rousing stage on which female swordswomen clash blade to blade, she reclaims what she calls "the power of the act of writing."

In "Ong Ong Ong" (September, National Theater of Korea) — a barrier-free music theater piece that reimagines the classical Korean tale "Ong Gojip Jeon" — she turned a lens on contemporary meritocracy and those who belong to the mainstream, asking anew what invisible lives look like and what the true meaning and measure of a life might be. Questioning the boundary between an assigned place and what lies beyond it, between the real and the fake, is a question Seo returns to consistently.

Her work is expanding across boundaries. She sympathizes with the warmth of "harmless stories" in which conflict yields to accommodation — but her conviction is that only by faithfully reflecting the contradictions of reality can a story give an audience the strength to go on living. She intends to push the questions and commitments within herself into ever more varied and daring territory. Having dismantled audiences' psychological defenses through exemplary minority narratives, her next step moves toward what she calls "an unhealthy queer" — a figure stripped of one layer of social censorship. "Just because someone is queer doesn't mean they can only ever be shown as bright and exemplary," she said. "People apply a standard of 'obscenity' to queer festivals and reach for the censor's yardstick — but that standard itself is a framework society has set." She added that she wants to write a monodrama featuring "the unfiltered monologue of a transgender character who goes around meeting any man she wants." Even a character an audience finds difficult to understand, she reasons, will generate powerful dramatic persuasion if their raw voice is poured out through the intimacy of a one-person show. At the end of that story lies solidarity.

"I want to say: 'I might not want to be friends with someone like that — but a life like that undeniably exists,'" she said. "Solidarity isn't a zero-sum game where someone has to be crushed for you to survive. I want to say that solidarity means not having to fight, and learning to live while enduring each other's differences."

shee@heraldcorp.com