You for Me for You

Yury Urnov uses an eclectic mix of theatrical devices to tell the story of Mia Chung’s You for Me for You, a fantasia of two sisters seeking to escape from North Korea to America: a revolving ring that delivers actors and props on stage, that can render a New York streetscape with toy taxis and waist-high apartment buildings; a backdrop stacked high with Asian storage boxes that pivots to reveal industrial scaffolding over which the sisters (Ruibo Qian as Junhee and Jo Mei as Minjee) clamber in their flight; a sound design by Elisheba Ittoop that simultaneously evokes the rumbles below decks of a huge cargo ship and taiko drumming; a song and dance break suggestive of Family Guy.

What, exactly, are the women escaping to? A consumerist paradise populated with fast-talking New Yorkers (uttered hilariously by Kimberly Gilbert as a salad of English understood imperfectly by newly-arrived Junhee) where the simple act of buying a phone requires graduate-school training? One that lacks the simple connections to the earth and home captured in a single ripe persimmon. And yet, as one of them says as they cross the border, “There’s nowhere else: let’s hurry to get there.”

  • You for Me for You, by Mia Chung, directed by Yury Urnov, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in association with Ma-Yi Theater Company, Washington