After Us | Before us
a Two-Play Cycle
One reckoning. Twenty years apart.
As a playwright and portrait photographer, my work lives at the intersection of the captured image and the curated self. This two-play cycle is a direct inquiry into the silences that shape us.
As a Korean-American adoptee, I explore how memory, legacy, and identity are constructed and deconstructed through family secrets and the long echo of trauma. These plays are deeply informed by my own recent DNA discovery of family in Korea, coupled with witnessing my adoptive mother lose her own story to Alzheimer's.
after us
On her twenty-first birthday, a photographer tracks down the globally famous actor who once played a significant role in her life. In the pressurized airlock of a film-set trailer in Santa Fe, a bourbon-fueled night of performance and radical honesty reveals the high cost of the secrets we keep to survive. The truth doesn't always liberate; sometimes, it just reveals the bars of a gilded cage.
Scheduled for an Off-Broadway debut in Fall 2026, After Us will premiere as a featured selection of RJ Theatre Company’s annual Circle Festival.
before us
The moving and tragic prequel to After Us. Before Us begins with a 2001 graduation night confrontation before plunging back to 1998. Here, Juilliard acting students Julian Moorehouse and Derek Vance forge a chosen family of two that deepens into a pure and terrifying romantic love, until the ambient terror of a post-Matthew Shepard America forces a devastating pact of silence that will create the ghosts that walk the stage in After Us.