Play lifts curtain on N. Korea's weirdness, and ours

North Korea often makes headlines, but what we know about life inside its borders is heavily distorted by its propaganda and Western rumor.

A new play produced by Mu Performing Arts takes a look at North Korea and explores why someone might want to flee the country — or stay.

"You for Me for You" follows two North Korean sisters as they attempt to flee the country. One makes it to the United States, where she struggles to adapt to a strange new world. The other falls down a psychological well, as she wrestles with leaving behind the only world she's known.

Playwright Mia Chung wrote the play in part because she was fascinated with how little we really know about life in North Korea.

"We have two shallow default settings for understanding or interpreting the country," she said. "On the one hand it's the butt of all jokes because of how extreme the culture seems from the Western perspective. And then the other default is just gloom and doom and stories of starvation and oppression. And neither of those, for me, is very satisfying."

Chung watched documentaries in which North Koreans showed unfailing loyalty to their nation. She heard stories of people who fled the country, only to turn around and try to go back after encountering life outside its borders.

"It didn't mesh with many of the stories or the interpretations that I'd heard, both from my parents, who were originally from South Korea, and the Western media," she said.

Chung's quest to understand the stories led her to thoughts of Stockholm Syndrome, and how people who have been kidnapped can come to rely upon and even defend their captors.

"It's a very human thing to be drawn into narratives and to build your lives around them," she said, "and for them also to fail you at times."

"You for Me for You" looks at what holding onto those narratives costs us, and what it takes to get us to let go of them.

Director Randy Reyes said he found the script compelling — and a little intimidating. It's a fantastical tale, filled with dramatic imagery.

"A rice orchestra, a well that fills up with frogs and water, trees that grow ears," he said. "It had these things written in it that I'd say, 'I don't have the budget to do that. How do you do that? How do you make that happen?'"

The show asks audiences to empathize with people they've never met, from a country they know little about — aside from fragmentary news reports on the latest actions of its supreme leader.

"I feel like sometimes you can vilify a whole nation because of what their leader does," Reyes said. "We're all human and we all want the same things; we all want food and shelter and love."

The twist in Chung's play, he said, is that it offers a satirical look at the United States through a foreigner's eye, from the constant presence of advertising to our obsession with looking great. Reyes pointed out that we have a cherished narrative of our own.

"In America it's the American dream, and in North Korea it's the greatest nation in the world," he said. "So we're both trying to convince our citizens that you're in the best place in the world, and what happens to individual humans when our countries are saying this and you're suffering?"

Mu Performing Arts' production of "You for Me for You" runs through March 6 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.