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“The Man Who Paints Time” (시간을 칠하는 사람)
Reviewed by Viktoryia Shylkouskaya
Recently, I had the pleasure of seeing one of the performances of “The Man Who Paints Time” at the ACC, timed to the 40th anniversary of the May 18 Democratization Movement. At first glance, the performance space looked more like an industrial warehouse than a theater. You enter a very big, dark room with an impossibly high ceiling. In the dark room, you only can see a five-row seat module facing one of the walls of the room. The wall is decorated to resemble a threestory building, which makes it look like a construction site. Surprised at first, I mistakenly thought I had been led on a sort of backstage tour. But no, I was at the right place. This form of theater space is called a “black-box” or “flexible-seating” theater. Either of these names is actually quite descriptive. This type of theater is generally housed in a large, black, rectilinear room. In such a space, audience seating may be moved around, allowing the performance area to flow through and around the seats, while the use of risers helps facilitate better sightlines.
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
July 2020
Play REVIEW
Y
ou probably know what 4D cinema is, where your seat moves in sync with the movie action, allowing you to “feel” the movie’s motion. But have you heard about 4D theater play, in other words, a “black-box” or “flexible-seating” theater? The ACC’s “The Man Who Paints Time” is one of them!
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The play starts. It gets incredibly busy in front of the building with construction workers, some locals, and passers-by. It is only three meters from where I am sitting to the actors. We hear the sound of a bulldozer, which is about to demolish the building. Suddenly, the seating platform holding the audience starts rolling towards the building, and I understand – we are the bulldozer that is moving to ram the building’s walls. Someone shouts: “Person in the building!” All the attention follows the light to the third floor. We see a man with a brush in his hands. It is Kim Young-sik, a man who cannot allow the demolition of the building because its walls hold the memories of past years. Every brick in its walls holds memories of his wife and son, who fell victim to a brutal military crackdown in Gwangju in 1980. These walls remember his entire life; these walls remember everything. The man suddenly jumps out of the window and the lights go down. To be honest, it is only five minutes into the play and I have already gotten goosebumps! It is the most unusual start to a play I have even seen. The lights come on again and we are back in time. The play tells us the story of the building with white walls and people who work there. The building is the former Provincial Office of Jeollanam-do, which later became the center of the May 18 Democratization Movement that unfolded in Gwangju in 1980. Kim Young-sik is one of the workers who is tasked with painting the facade walls of the building. One day, he meets the love of his life, Myung-sim, an office worker from the same building. Their love story starts from sharing an apple. We see apples so many times throughout the performance because the play employs a large number of metaphors. “Apple” (사과, sagwa) in Korean is pronounced the same as the Korean word for “apology,” making them homonyms. Throughout the play, the son of Young-sik and Myung-sim will eat apples while talking with his parents; later while busy with work, Myung-sim will give an apple to her son while he waits to play with her. It is
6/25/2020 12:43:49 PM
