TONY KUSHNER(TK): So tell me, who are you?

JESSE JAE HOON (JJH): What a question for an adoptee? I've only been writing since 2018, so it's kind of wild to be sitting here with you right now. Okay, I was adopted from South Korea and grew up in a family of Jewish artists for most of my life.

TK: Where in the States were you?

JJH: We were in Chicago, on the north side of Chicago. It was a very strange place to be, because there are pockets of the Midwest, like Minneapolis, that have so many adoptees, but Chicago's not really one of them. I functioned as either a Jewish kid with a different face or as a really weird Asian kid. I found theater when I was in high school, and my teacher, Robin Bennett, kind of forced me to try acting. She was also the teacher of [Saved director] Taylor Reynolds. There I did plays like Waiting for Lefty, which felt incredibly apt, because I grew up in a very left household full of artists who love to talk about labor all the time.

I went to school and became an actor, but I wasn’t really acting that much because I despise auditioning, though I was doing new play development with Clubbed Thumb as part of their Winterworks Series. From doing that, and watching playwrights do their thing, I really connected with that process more. I thought that was so much more fun than what I was doing at that time.

TK: In some ways it is more fun. At times it’s lonelier.

JJH: I guess, yeah. I don't know if you experienced this too, but writing can be long stretches of being really, really lonely. And then you get into the room and you're like, “Oh my god, I never want to do anything else for the rest of my life.”

TK: Yeah, unless, of course, the room is full of terrible people who are destroying your play, which can happen, but mostly it's fine. The hard thing in being a playwright, George Wolfe always says, is that you have to know when it's time to leave the party and go off and be lonely again. And I think that's true. We don't have the poets’ or novelists’ discipline of being used to that loneliness as your life. There’s always this kind of exciting thing that's going to happen when you get your play done.

Where did you go to college?

JJH: I went to Tisch, and I went to Playwrights Horizons Theater School. I didn't really write there, though. I had [three writing classes] and [Jen Silverman, Dano Madden/Andrew Farmer, and Jenny Schwartz taught them]. It was great. We wrote one acts…no one's ever gonna see that one act. I've burned it.

TK: I have many of those, the real first play.

JJH: But it was in college, and in my work as an organizer where I subconsciously formed a theory of how I wanted to conduct myself as a writer: towards a broad sense of collectivism.

TK: Does any of your writing practice at this point involve working collectively with people? I’ve heard so many different stories about how it worked, but you know, Caryl Churchill and Monstrous Regiment and Joint Stock, those British companies had plays allegedly partially written by the company. I think they're clearly written by Caryl Churchill, but there are some grumpy people out there who will say, “that line is mine, and I came up with that.” Do you work with actors improvisationally, like that?

JJH: I don't tend to. There was one process I did where I was adapting 12 Chairs [a novel by Ilya Ilf & Yevgeny Petrov], and I was adapting it for the present day, in internet comedy worlds. It was a very updated version of what that kind of satire was in the Soviet Union at the time. I was working with my friend Charlie Murray, who's a director, and she and our actors we worked with over four years had some input.

TK: Where does Saved fit into your body of work?

JJH: Saved is so new. I haven't had my first production yet. We have a saying in an adoptee world called “being in the fog.” And for so long, about adoption, I was in a fog, and I refused to write about it. I refused to touch anything around this topic. But I was applying for the Ollie Award from the Bret Adams & Paul Reisch Foundation, and I was coming into this by wanting to explore imperialism, on a very human and granular level as what is it like to live through a CIA-backed coup? I wrote a proposal about that, and I was about to send it in, and my friends stopped me and said, “they're not going to see you in this, they're prompting you to talk about adoption.” So I was grumpily googling about adoption history, and I found this book by Arissa H. Oh called To Save the Children of Korea, and it outlined in really great detail the origins of the Korean adoption industry. Where it lies in American-Korean politics, in Cold War politics, in the soft power humanitarianism of the time—that became my way into this story. This is how I can talk about adoption. Through that, begrudgingly, I came out of the fog. And then as I began to write, my other adoptee friends graciously helped me through the more personal stuff that inevitably comes up as you are looking at your life in the context of this horrible system and the ways those origins popped up.

When I started writing, I was looking for plays that were engaging with ideas at this scope. I had heard about Counting and Cracking, I knew The Vagrant Trilogy, and obviously Angels [in America], and I was thinking about how to approach this form with the same perspective I was going to approach the [2019, recently overturned] Bolivian coup, which is on a human level. We really have to understand why people are the way they are. I think because of that I wrote the first draft in a month.

TK: Wow.

JJH: Yeah, that was last January. I’m almost done with my 12^th draft of it. It’s been a wild experience to do this—nothing’s come out of me that fast before. Being a writer who hasn’t been produced, I’m just generating from text to text to text; it’s been a new and amazing and horrible experience.

TK: Horrible? In what way?

JJH: I happened to be working on this right when a documentary about the South Korean adoption industry aired on PBS, and it kind of blew open the lid on practices that had become normalized. And the world around me, America and South Korea, started to reckon with what this meant—not only for their own countries and for their intercountry relations, but also what it means for America’s influence on the world. Because to understand this, you can’t just go back to Harry Holt and the social workers, it goes back before that. It goes back to Jeju. It goes back to the Korean War itself. It goes back to the dissolving of The People’s Committees. It’s rooted in all these different things. So this was starting to come up in a very deep and unexpectedly personal way.

TK: When you were mentioning earlier the idea of a fog, tell me a little bit more about that. What does it encompass? What's the nature of it? Is it sort of what Peggy is dealing with in the play?

JJH: It’s partially that and that’s one way it manifests. I think a lot of being in the fog for adoptees has to do with narratives that we've been told about adoption. When we say somebody is in the fog, it means that we're operating from the perspective of these common narratives. Like the savior narrative, where you were “saved” from the savage land of Seoul, South Korea. Or the idea that you are defined by your role in somebody else's life, either in the birth family or the adoptive family, and I think there is a willing acceptance of these ideas when one is in the fog. The attempt to pierce it as Peggy experiences it is very jarring and releases a lot of rage and internalized racism. The fog engenders a desire to be viewed as whatever you need to be viewed as to be or appear to be normal and fully assimilated.

TK: You’re saying there’s an increase in one's hatred of those who one resembles. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I'm sure it was very difficult. Very difficult and painful. The size of the story that you've taken on is mind blowing and thrilling.

How far along are you with the second part? Where are you in that process?

JJH: I mean, part two is so alien to me.

TK: I am curious—what do you have in your mind? Do you have, however jerry-rigged or inchoate it is, an outline of the events of part 2?

JJH: I don’t actually!

TK: I'm a big believer in them. And like everything, every writer is different. I know a few playwrights who don’t outline. I would feel terrified to start without one, just launching out into the void—I appreciate a rickety skeleton that will absolutely change. Also, on days that you can't bear the thought of writing a line of dialogue, you can go back and fuck around with the outline. It's an interesting dialectic between intention and what's showing up. Outlining is writing a little letter to yourself before you're ready to launch out into it. You don’t have to tell me, but I assume you have some understanding of what Peggy’s connection will be?

JJH: It’s funny, I have an idea of what the pivotal scenes are. I know how Gyeong’s last scene ends, and I know how Peggy’s act two ending happens. But I honestly don’t know what happens after that.

TK: But returning to Part 1—have you heard it out loud?

JJH: I’ve had my friends gather on Zoom, and we read it there. So I've heard it that way, but The Spotlight Series will be the first time we are hearing this play in a room out loud. Which is, is wild.

TK: But when it goes out in the world let it be this naked thing and don't give it any form of protection. Your job is not to protect yourself. Your job is to be open, to let it all out, and it's just so clear that you have everything that you need to really penetrate into the depths. And so it's just hugely exciting work. I'm so happy to have read it.

JJH: Oh thank you. I'll say this for the record, this show wouldn't exist without Angels in America. This part one is so rooted in Millenium [Approaches].

TK: That’s really lovely to hear, but it’s its own thing now. You don’t have an audience talk-back, do you? At the Mark Taper Forum, Gordon David did a thing called Eat The Playwright, and they would do a reading of your play. Then, the audience would say, “well, the problem with your play is, the reason I don't like your play, and I don't like Samuel Beckett's plays…” [laughing] Who the fuck needs it?

So you listen to the audience while they're reacting to the play but then don't let them come up.

JJH: I wear a face mask indoors these days for sickness reasons, so I’m hoping people don’t recognize me.

TK: I think we have to make you a faceless child mask. And if people come up to you, you can just say “I don’t know who I am!”

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Jesse Jae Hoon is a playwright, organizer, and actor – born in South Korea, raised in Chicago & Berlin, and based in Queens. Jesse is a hopeful cynic whose work combines raucous comedy with a deeply felt sense of urgency to investigate power, class, hope, and our responsibility to the collective good. He’s the current CRNY Resident Artist at Ma-Yi Theater Company; a 2024 MacDowell Fellow; a 2022-2023 Writing Fellow at The Playwrights Realm; under commission from Theater J; the inaugural Radio Roots fellow with The Parsnip Ship, under guidance from Iyvon Edebori & Al Parker; an inaugural member of the Orchard Project Adaptation Lab; a member of The TANK NYC's LIT Council, Page Break, and the COOP’s Clusterf**k. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from Hunter College and a BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch (Playwrights Horizons).

Tony Kushner’s plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Slavs!, Homebody/Kabul, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With A Key To The Scriptures, and the musical Caroline, or Change with composer Jeanine Tesori. He has adapted Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit and Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechuan and Mother Courage and Her Children. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America, and for Steven Spielberg's Munich, Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans. His books include Wrestling With Zion, co-edited with Alisa Solomon; Brundibar, illustrated by Maurice Sendak; and The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present. Among other honors, Kushner was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris