Zoë Kim on Hunger, Love, and Making Art From Her Own Life
Zoë Kim in her solo play, Did You Eat? (밥먹었니?), directed by Chris Yejin, produced by CHUANG Stage and Seoulful Productions at Boston Center for the Arts. Photo: Maggie Hall.
On a Thursday evening in September, I connected with Zoë Kim as she prepared for the upcoming New York premiere of Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) at the Public Theater. After another long day of rehearsal for her deeply personal solo show, she responded with genuine delight when I asked my opening question, borrowed from the title of her piece.
Kim is a multi-hyphenate artist from South Korea (she came to the United States at age 16) and a classically trained actor who has created a beautifully vulnerable piece of art. Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?), written and performed by Kim, received a world premiere production, co-produced by Seoulful Productions, at Boston’s CHUANG Stage in the fall of 2024, and was met with enthusiastic reviews. The show, produced by Ma-Yi Theater Company in residency at the Public Theater between October 14 and November 9, is described as her “autobiographical journey through love’s many forms—how it’s learned, given, and reflected inward.”
Our conversation touches on Kim’s experience as a playwright, as a performer, and as a producing force that brought an earlier version of the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Not only has she spent years crafting the words of her story, but she embodies a particular kind of fearlessness, one that is required to transform one’s own life into a piece of live theater.
Though we run in the same circles, we never had the chance to meet. The shared Asian love language—asking our loved ones “did you eat?”—was not the only thing we bonded over. I’m truly grateful for this conversation, where her openness shines, just like in Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?).
DURRA LEUNG: Zoë, we’re talking at 8 p.m. You just came home from rehearsal. In the spirit of your piece, my first question is: Did you eat?
ZOË KIM: I love it so much! I did. I’m a creature of routines, so I just eat the same stuff all the time. Did you eat?
I did. I discovered this new salad recipe, and I’ve been sticking to it for a few weeks now.
The possibilities with a salad are unlimited. I mainly just eat a lot of ingredients because I can’t be bothered to cook for myself most of the time. I’m a meal prepper and I did eat before coming here.
How was today’s rehearsal?
It was great! I have the most incredible team and I just feel so taken care of and nourished and excited every day. This is only day three, but we’re making really good progress and I’m excited about where we’re headed. It’s a lot of movement, so physically demanding, but we’re off to a good start.
For those who didn’t experience Did You Eat? in Edinburgh or Boston, can you tell us more about it?
Did You Eat? is a solo show about my life, and it’s also about my personal philosophy around love. It’s really a love letter to my inner child.
Where were you creatively, before you decided to write this piece?
I was in a place of absolute desperation. I started writing this in 2022, when we were still in the thick of COVID. I had just graduated from grad school with my acting MFA the year before, which was awful timing. I was so desperate to be working. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to fulfill my hunger, to perform and be creative. So that’s what forced me into starting to write Did You Eat?.
The solo show is its own genre. It’s easier logistically than a multi-character show, but so artistically demanding. Are there any solo shows that made you want to—and made you believe that you could—create and perform one yourself?
The first solo show I ever saw was John Leguizamo’s Latin History for Morons on Netflix. Before that, I had never seen or experienced the solo form. My mind was blown, because I didn’t know you could do that and that it could be this good.
I also watched Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field on HBO. I was floored by her talent and artistry. I thought to myself, “I could never do this.” She’s incredible. It was really intimidating, as well as inspiring.
The first solo show that I saw in person was Soomi Kim’s My Little China Girl. The reason why Soomi’s piece was probably the most influential to my process is because I had never seen a Korean woman do it. They say you have to see it to believe it and to imagine it. Her show really opened my eyes and allowed me to dream, to imagine myself possibly doing that one day, though I didn’t know how.
I never had the desire to make solo work. I didn’t become an actor to act by myself. The reason Did You Eat? ended up becoming a solo show was because of COVID. I was so desperate and I had no money, and the only way that I could do it was to make a solo show where it would be cheap and COVID safe. Did You Eat? was not meant to be a solo show. Once I decided to make it into one, these solo shows that I really admired started flooding back into my brain space.
Did You Eat? is going to be the first part of a trilogy about hunger: Does that mean the other two chapters of the trilogy will not be solo shows?
Correct.
Will those parts also be autobiographical?
That’s another thing: Not only did I never mean to make a solo show, I never thought that I would make autobiographical work. I never, ever thought that I would be the kind of artist that would make art from my life, or talk about my life. I’m a very private person. I’ve never told anyone about my story outside of my husband. So it was a radical process for me to contradict myself in every way possible. It was that particular circumstance that pushed me into doing it.
It takes courage and vulnerability to put your own story out there. At which point of your creative process did you realize that this is not just your story but a piece of live theater that could connect with an audience who doesn’t know you personally?
The most profound moment where I realized that is when I took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival [in 2023]. I was curious to know if my very personal, very intimate, very Korean story would resonate with literally anyone else. I thought Edinburgh would be the perfect lab to workshop, not just the play but also to test the waters to see how a global audience would respond. Edinburgh really taught me that this play and my story are so much bigger than me. And I’m very grateful for that process.
Had you already started working with your director, Chris Yejin, in Edinburgh?
I would love to talk about my director, Chris Yejin. I can talk about her for another hour! She’s an absolute visionary and a genius, and one of my closest friends. I could have never made Did You Eat? if it wasn’t with somebody that I could trust with my life.
I genuinely feel like Chris and I made this show together, because she was with me before I had anything written. I reached out to her in 2022. I had some ideas, but it was very loose. We started having Zoom meetings every Monday, and we would just talk about ideas, about our lives. Whenever she felt something was interesting, she would say, “Why don’t you go and write a couple of pages about that and bring it back next week?” It was really through her direction and dramaturgy and the homework that Did You Eat? became clear.
We found the spine, the thread of the story. I wouldn’t have discovered that what I really wanted to talk about was love if it wasn’t for her noticing that. She’s really like the shepherd of Did You Eat?. Without her, we would not have this show. I call her my artistic soulmate.
Director Chris Yejin and Zoë Kim. Photo: Emma Zordan.
And as this collaboration continues, I’m sure Chris has done more than dramaturgy. Your script mentions that it’s a “very physical play,” and I’m curious what that means.
Chris and I, from the very beginning, as the text was emerging, thought that we could develop an interesting dichotomy between what the body or the voice is doing versus what the text is saying. In some way, it feels like a trilingual show: Korean, English, and movement as its own language. Something that the audience could find interesting is, what I’m hearing versus what I’m seeing, and what I’m feeling based on the combination or the conflict between the two. Because the text is distilled and concise, we were curious to explore what else might be going on inside the character. We really wanted to bring in physicality as its own character in the storytelling.
Do you envision having another performer do this show in the future?
Totally. In the beginning I wasn’t sure that could be possible because it was so autobiographical. But the more I do the show, the more I realize how resonant and universal this is. This play has grown to be much bigger than me. It belongs to all of us. It belongs to anybody who ever needed to be protected when they were children, to anybody who is in the journey of healing and breaking the generational cycles of trauma. So, yeah, at this point, I would love to see it continue with a different performer. I would love to see it. I’ve never seen the show, obviously, because I’ve been in it. It would be great to see what other people can bring to the story.
When I was reading the script, I noticed in the beginning the narrator directly addresses the audience as “you.” But then there’s a subtle change where “you” means the narrator herself.
That’s such an insightful observation that you’re sharing with me. It was definitely intentional. My director and I arrived at that decision in Edinburgh. In the workshop version the narrator was the mother’s character. It was the mother’s character talking about her daughter. When we finished the workshop run, my director—very profoundly, as usual—was like, “What if Zoë was the narrator and talking to Zoë like that? What would happen if we leaned into being even more personal and vulnerable than it already is?”
It was Zoë talking to Zoë that really allowed me to rewrite the play from page 1. It’s obviously because the narrator has changed, but it’s also the intention. What I would like to say in Did You Eat? radically changed, because it went from the mother talking to the daughter, to the daughter talking to herself.
Now that you’re in rehearsal mode, as you say the lines out loud repeatedly, are there any in which you’re finding new meanings?
A lot. When you write something versus when you hear it out loud, it lands differently, right? You’re like, “Oh, is that what I wrote?” Because so much of the writing process was internal and private, it was like writing a lot of poems. My favorite line in the whole play is in the last scene, where she says, “We got this.” If I could only send one phrase back to my child self, I just want to send that phrase to her. We got this. Don’t you worry. We’re going to be fine. We’re going to be great, actually. We got this.
You’ve expanded the show since Edinburgh. But is there any story or chapter that you had to cut for the flow of the show?
Once Chris and I, and also with my dramaturg Amrita Ramanan, decided to distill the play’s spine to love, we revisited every scene and investigated. We wanted everything that we were saying and doing to be about love, so anything that didn’t make its way back to love, we cut. I don’t think I cut anything that I wish I could have kept in or that I fought for. But there is something that I feel bad about. I have two dogs but I only talk about one, so I feel bad for my other dog that didn’t make it into the show!
The world premiere happened in Boston with CHUANG Stage. What was it like developing this piece with them?
I would love to tell you about CHUANG Stage headed by Alison Qu! I cannot imagine having had my world premiere of Did You Eat? with any other company. I have never been treated with so much nourishment and support and care and enthusiasm. It was an all-Asian femme and nonbinary–led team, and it just meant so much to me that I got to tell a story about Asian daughters with Asian daughters. Alison and her team bent over backwards to make sure that all the Zoës in this story were really held and taken care of.
It was such a community-oriented run. Because of their pay-what-you-can model, there were a lot of immigrant families and first-time theatergoers. I had people bring their immigrant moms who barely spoke any English but knew exactly what was going on. This is a love letter to the community. This is about us, for us, made by us. For our Asian-American community, we don’t always get to have that. I felt it was like the best thing I’ve ever done. I hope every Asian playwright in this country has an opportunity to work with CHUANG Stage because of their radical care.
Speaking of companies, you have your own, Seoulful Productions. Your director is also a part of the company. How does your company intertwine with your creative process?
Seoulful Productions is an arts nonprofit that exists to uplift Korean diasporic artists and their stories all over the world. I’ve always had the dream of having a place that is specifically for Korean diasporic artists, because oftentimes, especially in this country, we Asian people get lumped into this monolith. We’re such an amazing community and there would be value in finding and having a space where it was really for Korean diaspora people who know that culture and upbringing.
And again, it was COVID. I was desperate for community and desperate to keep us going as an artistic community. Interestingly enough, Did You Eat? and Seoulful Productions happened around the same time but not for each other. The reason why Seoulful Productions’ first artistic project is Did You Eat? is because it was free, and because it was my friends and I who were on the board. We needed to get this nonprofit going with no money. That’s how it happened.
Did You Eat? choreographer Iris McCloughan and Zoë Kim in rehearsal. Photo: Emma Zordan.
You’re such a multi-hyphenate. After this run at the Public, what’s next for you?
My dream is to be able to take Did You Eat? to Los Angeles because that is another part of the country where there’s a lot of us. And I would love to share this story with as much of our community as possible. But I can’t do this show forever, nor do I want to. It’s very hard on the body. Eventually I would love to pass the baton to other performers. I would love to start working on part two of this trilogy, and I would love to have other castmates to act with!
Before our conversation, I reached out to one of our many mutual friends, a fellow playwright, Jesse Jae Hoon …
We love him.
I said, give me a fun question for Zoë! Here it is: Zoë, which of your friends makes the best kimchi?
There’s only one person in my entire life I could think of: Jesse Jae Hoon!
Oh my god!
No competition.
Do you make kimchi yourself?
No, it’s hard work.
It also takes time, right?
So much time.
This new publication, The Hat, centers Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theater, which to me is a strong and intimate community. So, my final question is: What’s the one message that you want to give to other members of this community?
The cavalry isn’t coming. You are your cavalry. I made what I could because I needed to make something, and I did that on my own. Nobody gave me any financial support. I had no one. I knew no one. I knew nothing. I had nothing. It turned out that I was the biggest opportunity that I was waiting for. The cavalry isn’t coming. You are.
This interview has been edited and condensed.