The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
What are you? Are you a person, wholly independent? Are you a place, with a soul tied to your homeland and its circumstances? Or are you merely a thing?
Sora Baek's heartwrenching solo play Sell Me: I Am From North Korea, on offer at Pleasance Courtyard, is filled with uncertainty. Centering on a 15-year-old girl's (Jisun) journey as she defects from North Korea by willingly selling herself to the highest bidder, the show is a startling, multimedia experience that pushes back against Western conceptions of North Korean life.
In Jisun, Baek has crafted a cleverly innocent cipher through which a blend of historical photographs, real-life footage, Baek's personal experiences, and the public testimony of North Korean defectors can be alchemized. A second-generation North Korean refugee herself, Baek’s grandparents fled the North during the Korean war with her father when he was only four years old. She grew up in a small South Korean town across the river from North Korea, looking out at the empty ghost buildings.
Baek's construction of the piece is relatively straightforward, tying together two distinct timelines; one made up of Jisun's memories of life within North Korea, and one made up of her experiences outside of its borders. After deciding to sell herself to buy medication for her dying mother, she learns that her malnourished body is not sexually desirable enough for the men her trafficker finds. Abandoned in a foreign country with little knowledge of how to operate outside of North Korean society, Jisun struggles to reframe her own identity in a place where her very existence is illegal.
Jisun's fractured identity, and struggle to contextualize her memories outside of the strict obedience of thought dictated by North Korean leaders, makes for a heady and compelling narrative. "You don't ask questions around here," Jisun states, reflecting on the death of her father in a prison mining operation, and the lack of clarity provided to her family. "You just move on."
Like almost all Fringe shows, Sell Me: I Am From North Korea comes in at just under one hour; by the end of the piece, I found myself supremely frustrated to not have even more time with Jisun. As Baek continues to develop the work, which previously played an invited performance at the U.S. Capitol Centre, hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives, I can only hope that somehow the narrative will blossom into a fuller length piece. Jisun's story, and Baek's skill as a playwright, support it.
Sell Me: I Am From North Korea runs at Pleasance Courtyard's Below through August 25. Click here for tickets.
Sora Baek
Sora Baek
Sora Baek
Sora Baek
