Write what you know: Play School presenter mines real-life family drama
Despite being a Korean-Australian adoptee herself, actor and now freshly minted playwright Michelle Lim Davidson had not been planning to explore the topic in her debut play. In 2023, she was part of the Griffin Studio program, a creative lab for early career playwrights, and was planning a piece about K-pop, but after a post-pandemic trip to South Korea, the work's direction shifted.
'I was going back to see my Korean family. It was my second trip back after meeting them,' says Lim Davidson. 'I thought maybe as a playwright I should attempt to write what I know. So I came back and said, okay, the K-pop is still strangely relevant, but I am going to write about what happens after the [adoption reunion] Hollywood moment.
'After the hugging and the crying, how do you establish a relationship with somebody that you barely know? How do you bridge that emotional, cultural and physical distance? I felt it's not an experience people have had much insight into, and that's why I thought, well, I'll give it a go.'
The resulting play is Koreaboo. The two-hander stars Lim Davidson as Korean-Australian adoptee Hannah, who is visiting her birth mother in Seoul hoping to spend the summer connecting, but the reality doesn't live up to her initial expectations.
Lim Davidson drew inspiration for the work from her own life as an adoptee from South Korea. She grew up in Newcastle having come to Australia at four-and-a-half months old.
'I was the only Asian person at my school until year four, so you grow up not seeing anyone who looks like you and disconnected from your culture,' says Lim Davidson. 'So much of the play is about a Korean adoptee trying to go back and understand Korean culture, like experimenting through K-pop, but the characters discover that identity can't be manufactured.
'Anyone who's come from being born in a different country or had ancestral roots somewhere else, it's like you're constantly in that in-between world. It's been amazing to write my own role, that I fit into, with the messiness and rawness of it all.'
Lim Davidson started searching for her biological family in her late 20s, eventually finding them after a tough years-long bureaucratic process, filled with setbacks.
'I was able to reunite with my family in Korea, which is an immense, special thing in my life. I have their support and my family's support here in Australia, too, to write and share some of my experience,' says Lim Davidson. '[ Koreaboo ] is not a documentary on my life, but it has been imagined from reality.'
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