ACTOR STEPHENIE SOOHYUN PARK STEPHENIE SOOHYUN PARK HAS APPEARED IN TWO EDITIONS OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL, AND NOW SHE APPEARS IN THE PAPER DREAMS OF HARRY CHIN. HERE, STEPHENIE TALKS ABOUT HER UNIQUE AND FASCINATING JOURNEY TO BECOMING AN ACTOR.
HOW DID YOU FIRST GET INTERESTED IN THEATRE? I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. I went to a magnet school that was based strictly on IQ; there was no balancing for gender or race or income or anything. My class had 7 girls and 21 boys. So when one girl decided it would be cool to be in the play, all of the girls wanted to be in the play. I played the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. I had wanted to be Alice, and I didn’t recognize that my part was much cooler. I did theatre all through school; then I stopped in college. I went to the Wharton School for undergrad, which is a very hard-core finance school. You go to the Wharton School to become a master of the universe, to make a lot of money. I thought I wanted to be an investment banker, or a venture capitalist, or something. I was so wrong! Anyway, I happened to be in the financial district when September 11 happened. I saw a lot of things … it was very traumatic. I decided that I didn’t know how to live a life where I wasn’t sure if I was going to live the next day. To try to
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figure that out, I went into the Peace Corps. I worked in Benin, teaching small entrepreneurs accounting and marketing. And on the side I got a grant to do an AIDS education day, which got me really interested in human rights work. So I went to law school to become an international human rights lawyer—which I found out later doesn’t precisely exist in the way that most law students think it does. My first summer in law school I went to work for this fantastic NGO in Jakarta. One day, one of my coworkers showed up at work and said, “I’ve been working on trying to change a law for the last five years, and they turned down my final proposal.” And I thought, I don’t think I can pour five years of myself into something and not have anything to show for it. So I became a corporate lawyer like everybody else and paid off my loans. I was a bankruptcy lawyer at the height of the bankruptcy crisis. I worked
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