Run, Love!

“I woke up and the country was reunified!” A love story blooming across a reunified land

Can’t we greet reunification with a light heart — not with fear and worry, nor with impossibly high hopes, but the way we greet each new day when we wake? That’s the director’s intent, and the play overflows with nonstop fun.

Its premise: reunification has already happened, the Gyeongui Line has been restored, and a train now runs from Jeju through an undersea tunnel all the way to Manchuria. The audience is invited aboard, and the stories unfold at each stop — Jeju, Namwon, Pyongyang, Mount Baekdu. Riding a train racing toward Manchuria across land that is all ours, with nothing blocking the line — isn’t that thrilling just to imagine?

A fiery romance between a Southern man and a Northern woman; an espionage-action-adventure-love-fantasy starring unified-government agents Seong Chun-hyang and Lee Mong-ryong; a Mokpo gang trying to expand into Manchuria; Lee Su-il and Kim Jung-bae competing for Sim Sun-ae as she prepares for a hopeful new era; and an elderly couple separated by war, each with a family on either side, in a heartbreaking reunion — all woven together with dance, pungmul and song into a bright, cheerful reunification story. And the final episode brings tears.

This play is a portrait of love: four love stories, each told as a parting — but every parting carries the hope of meeting again. Sometimes serious, sometimes silly, the train becomes a symbol of hope for reunification, and the many characters aboard comically imagine life after it. Most of all, reunification theatre here moves beyond grave talk of the pain of division: perhaps, through love, we can become one without conditions. In the end, isn’t it harmony of hearts that will bring reunification closer? We dream of a warm-hearted reunification, and of a breeze of life blowing through the DMZ.