Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
'Opening Night' blurs inter-genre borderline
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“Opening Night” by Flemish director Ivo van Hove was staged at LG Arts Center in southern Seoul from Thursday to Sunday. / Courtesy of LG Arts Center
By Kwon Mee-yoo
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Theater and film were blended together by Flemish director Ivo van Hove in “Opening Night” at the LG Arts Center in southern Seoul from Thursday to Sunday.
Presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam and NTGNT, the piece revolves around Myrtle, an actress going through a midlife crisis, convincingly portrayed by Elsie de Brauw, who performs the lead role in the play-within-a-play “The Second Woman.”
The sensitive actress is worried that her image might stick as an old woman and becomes confused because the resemblance to her character Virginia is blurring the line between her real self and the role. Consumed by this internal chaos, she calls the director at 4 in the morning to confess her anxiety and confronts the playwright as she cannot understand her character.
Then, Myrtle meets a girl named Nancy. Nancy asks for Myrtle’s autograph saying she is a big fan. However, the girl is killed in a car accident and Myrtle starts to see her ghost and projects her youth into the spirit. Myrtle has no choice but to kill the ghost, or her younger self, to survive.
As the actors went back and forth between their roles and parts in the play-within-the-play, it was sometimes puzzling.
The line between a play and a movie as well as the stage and the auditorium became most obscured when Myrtle, missing right before show time on opening night, was found at the emergency staircase of LG Arts Center. The director and cameraman dashed to the stairwell where the drunken, disheveled Myrtle is showed to the audience through several screens installed in the theater. She was taken inside and changed in front of the first row, considered as backstage in their play.
The stage manager announced the delay as due to a “small technical problem” to the onstage audience in fluent Korean, receiving a rapturous applause in the process and finally Myrtle makes it on to play Virginia.
Myrtle finds her “answer” in the play as she recites Virginia’s lines, who says everything has answers, though she cannot quite understand aging.
The play is based on the 1977 namesake movie by John Cassavetes, but van Hove has done much more than just adapt it for the stage by breaking the mold of the proscenium theater.
“Opening Night” experiments between a movie and a play; the stage and the seats; and reality and acting.
There was a stage, a dressing room and a small seating on the stage of the LG Arts Center and the audience in the auditorium did not have a full view of everything. Those sitting onstage became the audiences for “Opening Night” as well as guests for “The Second Woman.”
The hidden part of the stage was shown on a screen thanks to two cameramen who usually offer close-up shots of the actors. Such close-ups brought more dynamicity to the play as it showed detailed facial expressions of the actors which cannot always be seen in big theaters.