Sneak Peek: Daniel K. Isaac Podcast

Jo Reed: Daniel, tell me what it is you wanted to convey with this play “Once Upon a (Korean) Time?

Daniel K. Isaac: I know that I was going on a personal excavation or exploration of my history, my lineage, my hyperawareness and education and the Western or European-centric storytelling and folktales and fables and mythology and such, and I wanted this to be a chance where I interrogated what it meant to not know my own Korean stories, my motherland’s folktales and fables and origin myths and whatnot, and so I wanted to figure out a way to theatricalize those stories that I was ingesting but also question the lineage that I come from as a Korean American child of immigrants, and I know little but some about how the Korean war affected my family and also how it-- how the Japanese occupation impacted my family, and so I guess I am exploring on my own and hoping to share that journey through this play, through this piece.