About the Play:

Hannah and the Dread Gazebo is a full-length comedy by Jiehae Park. The story of a young woman searching for the meaning of a mysterious object she receives from her grandmother, right before that grandmother disappears (and perhaps commits suicide) by jumping into the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Hannah and the Dread Gazebo deals with questions of family, legacy, and the need for stories from our past to help us make meaning from our present.

As Hannah and the Dread Gazebo begins, Hannah is two weeks away from becoming a board-certified neurologist in New York when she receives a mysterious FedEx package containing a suicide note from her grandmother in Seoul, Korea, who may – or may not – have just ended her life in a most flamboyant fashion, along with a smooth, white stone that the note says is "a wish." Hannah flies to Seoul with her brother, Dang, to join their parents. This reunion leads Hannah and her family on a surreal, funny, heartbreaking adventure back to their roots in South and North Korea, where her grandmother recently jumped from the roof of the Sunrise Dewdrop Apartment City for Senior Living onto the wrong side of the Demilitarized Zone that divides them. Oops. With guest appearances by the ghost of Kim Jong-Il, subway mystics and a mythological talking tiger, the story twists together creation myths and other mischievous fragments of the family's past to explore what it means to walk the edge between cultures.

Hannah and the Dread Gazebo premiered in 2017 at the internationally acclaimed Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. The play has been performed in regional, fringe festival, and college theatre productions.

Cast: 4 female, 2 male

What people say:

"If you’re keen to have your mind expanded by an evening of theater that is not going to be comparable to anything you’ll see anytime soon, Hannah and the Dread Gazebo is a good place to start." — Mail Tribune

"...a charming, balanced inquiry into race, culture and family." — Eugene Weekly

About the Playwright:

Jiehae Park is a Korean-American actress and writer, known for her play Hannah and the Dread Gazebo.