Cardboard Piano by Hansol Jung
“What happens when you’re confronted with a truth you’d tried to bury, and everything breaks?” asks Hansol Jung, author of Cardboard Piano in the 2016 Humana Festival of New Plays at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Positing questions of faith, religion, forgiveness and absolution in a time of life-shattering violence, Jung’s use of theatricality and wit help restructure what we come to expect in American realism today. The slight, savvy calculations in Jung’s form—via two-character casting and temporal drag between acts—echo the shattered and rebuilt lives we see onstage.
“I think it is vital we produce plays that are not just (about) this country,” says Les Waters, Artistic director of the festival. Vital indeed, as Hansol Jung’s expertly crafted new work shows. Landing on the eve of the millennium (“We survived!” exclaims one of our protagonists ironically) the story begins in the heart of war-ravaged Northern Uganda. Two star crossed young lovers prepare for their secret marriage in a church till plans go awry—(sound familiar? Don’t get too comfortable…Jung explodes the Shakespearean trope into something transcendental.)