Renowned theatre director Weyni Mengesha had agreed to direct the show, but due to scheduling conflicts, she couldn’t. So I took on the Herculean task of producing and directing the play I had written, which I was also performing in. I had no money, so I began raising funds through donations from friends and family, and selling ad space in the playbill. Soon after, actor and playwright Leon Aureus came on board as co-producer. We knew that we could count on the Toronto theatre-going crowd because of the quality of the cast and because the play had won the New Play Contest. What would prove to be a challenge was reaching the Korean audience, which was vital to me.

We went to every Korean store in K-town south (Christie and Bloor) and K-town north (Yonge and Finch), putting up posters and talking up the show. We sent posters with a cover letter to every Korean church in Toronto. We were interviewed by all the Korean media outlets and even ran a “Win Free Tickets: Korean Trivia Contest” through our Facebook page. Leon posted trailers on YouTube, which a lot of the Korean media picked up and ran on their programs. Later, Sojeong Choi came on board and did an incredible job in helping us publicize the play to the Korean community. Even cast members were tweeting, posting on Facebook, doing whatever they could to help the show gain exposure. That was the producing side of it. That was the hard part.

The show itself proved to be the easy part. I already had the cast in mind from doing workshops in the past, and they were all willing to be in the play for pretty much nothing. Actors Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, Jean Yoon, Esther Jun, Andre Sills, and I, along with stage manager Kat Chin and designer Ken Mackenzie, met whenever we could, rehearsing, free of charge, in the basement of Grace Toronto Church and in the sanctuary of Toronto Korean Bethel Church. Rehearsals were highly collaborative. We ate out together a lot and got to know each other very well.

By the time we opened, all of the advance tickets (50 percent of the run) had been sold and there was an incredible, euphoric buzz surrounding the show, especially after it had been featured on the cover of NOW Magazine. People were lining up for tickets two to three hours in advance and many were turned away. One Korean family came all the way from Parry Sound at the request of their friends, who told them to “close the store and come see this play; it’s about us.” The audience was about one-third Korean, one-third Caucasian, and one-third every other ethnicity under the sun, young and old. All seven performances at the two-hundred-seat Bathurst Street Theatre had sold out. The play then went on to win the Patron’s Pick Award, selling out an additional show in three hours. It was invited to be part of the Best of Fringe Uptown Festival, where it sold out an additional seven shows at the two-hundred-seat Studio Theatre at the Toronto Centre for the Arts.