Did You Eat? Off-Broadway Reviews

The fact that Kim tells the story of her upbringing not with rancor and resentment, but rather with acceptance and understanding, seems almost unfathomable. But she does, and she tells it with her whole body, moving nearly the entire time. (The intricate, sometimes balletic, sometimes aerobic, choreography is by Iris McCloughan.) It’s as if she’s processing her emotions through with each carefully controlled step, turn, twist, and sweep.

There is no slow reveal of hidden information, no trickle of showing, not telling, that may come from watching multiple characters interact with one another. Throughout the piece, Kim embodies different members of her family — Umma, Appa, her two grandmothers, herself as a child — and her physicality is impressive; choreographer Iris McCloughan also gives Kim body language to express the sensation of being overwhelmed, whether by love or by depression.

Kim is a deceptively captivating actor: friendly and chipper one moment, calm and reserved the next. You can see how she managed to endure the hardships that her family hurled at her, maintaining a brave face of composure through even the most brutal acts of cruelty. Her writing, too, is marked by a similar restraint. Time and again, she lets the words and actions of others speak for themselves rather than raise her voice or add rhetorical flourishes. She prefers to embrace the euphemisms that can convey a dictionary of subtext. Hers is a story that would rightly prompt many to scream in anger; she chooses to whisper and carry on with an admirably steely resolve.

Kim ends Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) with the reminder that bad cycles and painful legacies can be thwarted and replaced with new, better ones. And though it’s easy to be cynical about such decrees, by allowing the world to hear the darkest parts of her life – and showing how she’s emerged on the other side triumphant – Kim gives the audience genuine reason to believe that change, and love, remain possible.