When Puppets are Humans and Humans are Puppets
Lee Yun-taek’s (Y. Lee) The Dummy Bride (1993) is constructed from the influence of previous indigenous performances, such as Lee Kang-baek’s (K. Lee) Getting Married (1974) and Oh Tae-sok’s plays, which introduced modern theatre reform to Korea. Traditional Korean puppetry and mask dancing (talchum) are also evident in The Dummy Bride since they are theatrical elements that balance against the Western drama forms applied to contemporary Korean theatre near the end of the 20th century. The play has also been “written roughly five years after the Seoul Olympics, an event that represents, for many Koreans, the nation’s transformation from a third world country with one of the lowest standards of living on the globe into an economic power in Asia” (D. Kim 125). The theme behind this merging of the traditional and non-traditional aspects reminds us how Korean citizens must notice those who straggle behind in such fast-paced industrial improvement, such as sweatshop workers and the poor who have been marginalized from seeking the capitalist dream. After suffering through the Korean War and repetitive dictatorships, the utopia once dreamed of by Koreans has been revealed to be only for the selective view, instead of being enjoyed by the majority. The Dummy Bride gives voice to those who do not have one and are continuously drown-trodden in society even to this day.
The first scene which introduces the setting of The Dummy Bride immediately shines its spotlight on those who are usually shunned from the standards of a materialist society, by describing the location as a “congested area of slums in Seoul” contrasted to “Shindorim… [meaning], a new city built in the forest” (Y. Lee 132). How Y. Lee prioritizes social awareness for those who receive no attention in reality, correlates directly with K. Lee’s play, Getting Married, which was written approximately twenty years before The Dummy Bride. Getting Married is also a play that resists the prioritization of material worth over intrinsic human value in the standards of modern Korea’s communal perspective. The script begins with a man seeking for a woman to marry. Yet he laments from being discouraged by the amount of luxury he needs to obtain for his marriage dowry: “what girl in this world would marry a penniless man like him?” (K. Lee 161). Due to this deterrent, the man earns a “loan [that has] a time limit” in order to “make him look like a rich man”, which signifies the futility and limitations of material goods (K. Lee 162). In contrast to the bleak intro, the play ends on a positive note, since the man succeeds in marrying the woman he loves despite being “stripped and revealed for what” he is, which is dissimilar to the tragic closure in The Dummy Bride (K. Lee 176). The happy ending rewarded to these protagonists is a reflection of what Y. Lee earnestly wishes for the dummy bride in his own play, but “[b]ecause this world is a difficult place to meet those people whose lives are beautiful”, the young woman is brutally raped (Y. Lee 132, 142). In K. Lee’s ideal world, the hero and heroine find the pure worth of ‘beauty’ in each other, untarnished and protected from the corruption of a material-induced society. However, Y. Lee’s characters still wait and yearn for such “a beautiful person” to arrive and purify their doleful existence with love, which is highly unlikely to happen given the tragic circumstance (133). The realization that comes from comparing Getting Married to The Dummy Bride is, even though they are both “apt parable[s] of a materialistic modern society”, the former is closer to an ideal fantasy whereas the latter is a more realistic “representation of the underbelly of the Korean economic ‘miracle’ [that] did not benefit from the ‘boom” (D. Kim 125, 126).
Comparisons between K. Lee and Y. Lee stem from the fact that both playwrights have been influenced extensively by one of the masters of contemporary Korean theatre, Oh Tae-sok. These two contemporary playwrights are from a “period… generally recognized as the era of new experimental theatre [which] saw Oh Tae-sok as the leader of this new development” (Yoh). Similar to many of Oh’s plays, The Dummy Bride and Getting Married carry on Oh’s pessimistic view, since they are set in a universe where it reinstates the grim reality that “Korean history is essentially tragic” (Oh 3). In regards to performance style, K. Lee and Y. Lee’s plays both follow Oh’s legacy by being “committed avant-gardist[s] who mime Korea’s cultural and theatrical traditions” (Oh 1). For example, Getting Married implements a surreal concept of time and reconfigures our understanding of our physical bodies. In a setting where the passing of time is transfigured in a way to represent one’s life as a whole, the servant forcefully removes “trivial trinkets” that adorn the man’s appearance (K. Lee 171). In The Dummy Bride, whenever a violent action transpires on stage, such as the climactic scene when the men brutally rape the dummy bride, the actors utilize puppets instead of their own bodies to befuddle the distinction between man and a lifeless puppet — thus questioning the weight of life and its responsibility given to every man. As a result of this application of avant-garde theatre format, Oh, Y. Lee and K. Lee can also be recognized as agents for “introduc[ing] nonrealistic and absurdist drama to Korea” (Oh 1).
It is historically appropriate to suggest that K. Lee serves as a bridge between Oh and Y. Lee, in terms of theatrical style and scriptwriting, since “Korean modern drama [have been]… trying to pursue its self-identity in this transitional period” (Yoh). However, while K. Lee deviates from Oh’s excessive pessimism by granting a marriage his protagonists rightfully deserve, Y. Lee continues Oh’s “brutal assault on Korea’s indifference to such social problems as prostitution, crime, and violence — caused… by rampant materialism” (15).
Another notable difference between K. Lee and Y. Lee is in their approach to “Oh’s views [on] Korean history… in danger of losing a native spirituality as a result of Western cultural influence” (3). While there are no integrations of traditional Korean theatre genres in K. Lee’s Getting Married, Y. Lee adopts and then profusely employs conventional Korean artistry via puppetry and mask dancing (talchum). Similar to how Oh balances the western avant-garde movement with historical Korean performance devices, The Dummy Bride allows the meaning behind the construction of Korean puppetry and mask dancing to resurface. Originally, “traditional Korean puppet play… was the product of a feudal society… [and] “[p]uppeteers all belonged to the lowest social class” (Cho 7, 12). Y. Lee supports this puppetry genre, since his main protagonist, the dummy bride, who is also the predominant victim of all the atrocities committed by more powerful characters, is essentially “a miniature dummy/puppet, attached to a living actress, thus precluding any audience identification with realism” (D. Kim 126). Nevertheless, the beauty of paradox in this play “is that the ‘dummy bride’ comprehends life and its pain more deeply and poignantly than any other ‘character’ in the play” (D. Kim 127).
The Dummy Bride portrays a further critical understanding of paradox within its usage of traditional Korean masks. When the lascivious men who previously raped the bride continue to inappropriately grope her body, the “foot-mask play” functions to describe this scene (Y. Lee 144). Traditionally, “mask dance-drama has long sympathized with the struggling and abused common people”, but in the modern-day version, this meaning has been subverted, since the mask that is supposed to be worn on one’s face is now worn by the foot, which acts as a symbol for our regressive society (Y. Kim). D. Kim refers to this subversive performance as an occurrence of how “regimented, repressed Korean civil behaviors [are] freed of restraint and given over to bestial desires” (127). Therefore, “[r]eality is unmasked through the surreal masked drama of revolt and subversion against the invincibility of the existing system” (Park 215). Y. Lee is in this sense, unafraid to reveal the ugliness of current societal problems, even if it means perverting the original usage of talchum.
The acting of the dolls embodies just how much inhumane humans have become, as Y. Lee stirs “the voice of conscience in times of national peril and mourning” (Park 276). The need for improvement of social conscience, not only at an individual level but through a communal consensus, is provoked by a sex worker, another female victim who is preyed upon in the play: “a man should have some conscience,” she says (Y. Lee 136). By dehumanizing the men and forcing them to wear puppets during scenes of rape and violence, Y. Lee also presents his version of an image of the tainted conscience and loss of his own faith in humanity. Not only economic wealth but the female sex is also objectified and fetishized throughout the play, signifying that from an intersectional standpoint, impoverished women are the most preyed upon as they occupy the most bottom rung of the socioeconomic hierarchy. Consequently, all the pent-up anger from the disempowered male figures is released upon those who are more disenfranchised. According to Park, “traditional politics of gender and sexuality is unmasked in arts”, which functions as an “explicit satire on the arbitrariness of the social hierarchy or the patriarchal marital system” (215). Thus, Y. Lee develops and modernizes his innovation of classic mask-dancing by not only defending the poor but women as well, who have been the most marginalized in Korean history. This is not a farfetched assumption since “[s]tarting in the 1990s, it was feminist theatre that made up the most popular stream in Korean theatre” (Y. Kim). Through his experimentation of puppetry and mask-dancing, Y. Lee has advocated the prevention of “many indigenous rituals and performances and their traditional habitats… [being] destroyed or deconstructed… [i]n the wake of massive industrialization, machination, and capitalization” (Park 275).
By explicating modern Korean performances, The Dummy Bride and Getting Married, in the context of Oh’s method of combining western avant-garde with “traditional Korean theatre, which features both puppets and masks”, Y. Lee is unique in his treatment of its “familiarity to connect with audiences in an instinctively cultural… way” (D. Kim 128). Although Y. Lee’s choice is progressive in its hopeful intention of improving societal norms, by shedding light on the exploited ‘other’, critics pose a perturbing question in his way: Can Korean theatre and drama “be resuscitated to depict modern life beyond victimization and mourning” (Park 276)? The Dummy Bride problematizes Korea’s current issues around injustice due to the power imbalance between the rich and poor, man and woman, but future Korean performances must endeavor to find a solution for this problem stated by playwrights like Oh, K. Lee, and Y. Lee. Theatre is a cultural medium, which must reflect and guide the audience towards progressive thinking and dispute by acknowledging the ugly truth, hidden away by mass media since “[t]he portrayal of one of the most fundamental aspects of humanity in performance often poses a challenge to the culture it reflects” (Park 214).