by KYLE PARTAIN
A girl, a boy, a high school love story. Laurain Park wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with her real life-inspired play, One-Sided Fish.
And yet, the 15-year-old freshman at the Alexander Dawson School in Lafayette, Colorado, managed to impress the judges of a local playwriting competition with what they described as her “modern-day spin on Disney’s The Little Mermaid,” beating out 74 other entries to win the Denver Center for the Performing Arts first Regional Youth Playwriting Workshop and Competition. Student actors from the Denver Center Theatre Academy will stage two performances of her work on June 27 at the Conservatory Theatre. Though a self-proclaimed bad English student, Park produced a full-length play that deeply impressed judges at the Denver Center with what they saw as its genuine quality and beautiful writing.
“Her heart was on the page in a lot of ways,” noted the Denver Center’s Allison Watrous. “She kept saying, ‘It doesn’t have to be an epic story, right? It can just be about a girl who really exists in this world?’ She was very interested in the idea of a slice of life, real life.”
Born in South Korea, Park has lived alternately in Seoul and the United States (Virginia, back to Korea, then to Colorado) for the past six years, and has studied English her entire school career. Yet she finds writing in English challenging, and that made her win in the competitive playwriting contest all the more surprising to her.
“I’ve just never been very good at it,” she said. “It’s not my first language, so I feel more comfortable in Korean. I thought I was a math and science student, and thought I will never be related to the theater. This is such a discovery for me, proving things that I thought about myself were actually wrong.”
Ultimately, however, her difficulty with the English language was far from seen as a weakness in the eyes of the competition’s judges. “Her voice—because she doesn’t speak English as her first language—she has this really beautiful poetry,” said Steven Cole Hughes of the Denver Center. “Her grammar and syntax are not quite right. It’s a little bit off, and that is the charm and the beauty of her writing.”
Park decided at the last minute to enter the contest, and spent much of the Thanksgiving break last fall putting her story into words. “Some parts are from my inner self. It was really affected by my life,” she said.
“I didn’t have much time; it wasn’t that well organized and had a lot of spelling errors,” she added. “I thought it was horrible and would be the worst play.”
Hibernating, as teens in any country are apt to do during the Christmas break, Park was awakened at noon one day with news that she was a semifinalist. When she learned a few weeks later that she’d made the top three, she was just sure her mother was lying to her. She sat in the front row on Feb. 8 for staged readings of the three finalists’ works.
“It was kind of weird,” she admitted. “I put all of my inside thoughts that I had never told anyone into the play. It was a really weird feeling to hear them reading it for everyone. It was like a violation of my mind.”
A few weeks later, a bad day turned into one of Park’s best days when she got news that she’d won the competition. It was a fitting conclusion for Park, who mainly entered the contest so she wouldn’t have to wonder what might have been.
“It’s a story about how to live a life, that was the basic idea,” she said. “I think we should live without regrets and make decisions like that. It’s just a story about finding yourself. It was a story that I had always wanted to write. I had wanted to be a writer since I was in elementary school, but I kind of forgot about writing for a few years. This was a chance to find out if I could be good at this.”
With that question resoundingly answered, Park has already started on her next writing project: this time, a novel.
Photo by Kyle Partain
This article was published in the June 2014 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today! To purchase a single issue copy of the June issue, click the “Buy Now” button below. (U.S. customers only. Expect delivery in 5-7 business days).
