Interview: Stephanie Soohyuh Park

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 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

6 to 7 days a week, 8 am to 10 pm at least, most days, and I was just exhausted. When I got married, I took a honeymoon. It was the first vacation that I’d ever taken at the firm, and people were giving me a lot of heartache for it. I was talking to a paralegal, and she said, “Steph, you’re always talking about starting a restaurant. The Top Chef people are doing this reality TV show and you get to win a restaurant. You should totally do it.” And I thought, that’s ridiculous. And then the night before I left for my honeymoon, people were just pouring work on me, and I was so mad. So I made a tape that was all of a minute and a half. It was me lying on a couch, and I said, “This is my restaurant idea: I want to do healthy food that’s not soups or salads. You can get it within fixed calorie ranges. Thanks.” That was basically my video. And then they called me, and I thought, you’re not going to end up on this show, but how much would you hate yourself if you don’t just try. And I ended up being on the show and coming in fourth. It was really stressful and I was kind of embarrassed about it. I’m still a little embarrassed about it!

I decided I wanted to go back to everything I remembered loving in my life before. I had paid back all of my law school loans, and I thought, I’m just going to take a break, figure things out, and then go back to practice at a smaller firm. I worked at a restaurant, I traveled a little bit. I have a friend who runs a chorus that sings for the New York Pops, so I got to sing at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday concert, which was very cool.

During my first year of law school, I had auditioned for some student films. One of them was for Damien Chezelle, who years later directed La La Land and Whiplash and First Man. I thought, wow, I love film. So now I decided to take an acting class. The teacher kept asking me, “What are you going to do with this?” And I said, “I’m just here for fun.” After the last class, he said to me, “I will get you an agent. I think this is your new career.” So I met with the agent, and he said they wanted to represent me, and I said, “Look, I’m already old. I have no experience. Are you sure this is a good idea?” And he said, “Well, we want to take a chance on you, so we would really like it if you would take a chance on us.” I thought that I would probably do it for a year or two and then stop. And it’s been nine years now. I still do some lawyering on the side. I get contracted out sometimes with firms, and I do consulting through a startup in California, so I do remote work with them. WHY DID YOU MOVE TO INDIANAPOLIS?

My husband’s dream job was to be an assistant United States attorney for the government. Two weeks after our second child was born he said, “I got the job, and we’re going to move as soon as I get my federal clearance.” And I said, “OK!”

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE PAPER DREAMS OF HARRY CHIN?

I’m so excited for Paper Dreams. I love new work. And I think there is a renaissance in Asian American theatre right now. That means so much to me as an Asian person who didn’t ever see myself growing up. I think I was in my twenties when I first saw an Asian person on stage playing something that was not some stereotype, but a fully realized Asian character on stage, played by an Asian actor. It just gave me this feeling of—oh my god this is possible, oh my god people want to watch this, oh my god I’m not alone. And Paper Dreams is part of the building of canon of Asian American theatre.

I think it’s interesting to see the mixed family in the play. As someone who has children who are hapa—half Asian—I worry. I don’t know what growing up is going to be like for them, because I know it hasn’t always been easy for the people I know who are my age and mixed ethnicity. At one point in the play, Laura, Sheila’s mom, says that she doesn’t want Sheila speaking Chinese. And even though I’m 100% Korean, I never learned the language growing up, because the thinking then was that we want to assimilate, we don’t want to stand out, we don’t need anything else separating us from everyone else. So in many ways the play speaks deeply to who I was growing up. It also has a connection beyond that, to the generation before, and what it was like for them to come over, and the difficulties they faced, but also the things they left behind, which is something I never heard about that much. And it’s just deeply theatrical. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT FINALLY GETTING TO PERFORM THE SHOW AFTER A TWO-YEAR COVID HIATUS?

I think it’s a real gift to come back to any show a second time, because you can take an even deeper dive. During the pandemic, there has been a very large rise in violence against Asian people. I have friends who won’t go out at night any more, or who are afraid to walk home alone. I have wished that we were able to share this show, in order to humanize the Asian immigrant experience. I think that’s the missing element: some people don’t see Asian people as fully human. Throughout history, humans have tended to have an in group and an out group. Often, I think that when people hear someone who speaks with an accent, they relegate them to the outside group: somebody who should be less cared about. So I think that it’s really wonderful to have a show whose main character is a person with an accent, and to see that his accent does not make him less of a person. It does not make his human experience less or his accomplishments less. It shows how difficult it is to jump to a place where you are not a native, and that to find a life there is a difficult and brave thing.