Save the Green Earth

Kim Kibum's newest project gets a 10 out of 10, would do again rating from me~ Key's performance of Byeonggu in Save the Green Earth debuted April 12 here in Korea and man was it a rough ride. This play is really confronting and then hysterical in the same breathe so I found myself getting a bit of emotional whiplash from all the insanity on stage. 


Key was, in a word, phenomenal. I can't wait to go see this show again because there was just so much going on that I feel like half of what happened dissipated into the black hole of my brain. To give a summary of the story, Key plays Byeonggu who kidnaps an executive at a pharmaceutical company because he believes he is an alien. The play essentially goes about unearthing Byeonggu's incredibly sad past and the reason for his mental instability, in a really off-beat quirky manner. Key appears like a lucid, intelligent young man and in the blink of an eye he'll be muttering rapidly to himself, then sinking into his own mind, twitching and unresponsive. He plays an extremely violent aggressor who is then revealed as someone who has been a victim of violence his whole life which has driven him to act the way he does. He portrays Byeonggu, who is essentially a cold blooded murderer, as childlike and lost. A character that could be so easy to hate, is instead someone we can sympathize with deeply.

I think the part that stood out to me the most was the scene where Byeonggu is having a vivid flashback/hallucination of the events of his youth. You can see him sobbing and begging his father to stop hitting him and his mother, before he rapidly changes and is cowering and stood at attention while a teacher berates and hits him. The way Key's body language, facial expressions and voice changed back and forth and back and forth as the scene progressed was genuinely fascinating and completely gripping. He eventually breaks down and starts sobbing and rocking on stage at one point and just as I could feel tears running down my face, he rapidly sits up and smiles and says: 'I'm ok' and continues on as if he hadn't just broken down completely. 

I think it was more uncomfortable for me to watch this play because I have such a soft spot for Key in my heart. Watching him get abused by his father and teacher was awful. Being a teacher myself I was especially appalled at the scene where his teacher was beating him. There's a scene where Byeonggu's mother passes away and watching him sob and beg her to come back was painful, especially considering how good Key is at performing these kinds of scenes. He walks a really fine line between being over the top and perfectly distraught and never tips into the ridiculous spectrum. I think the scene where he randomly meets a childhood bully who proceeds to hit him around the head and try and take any money he has on him was one of the most memorable for me. Key was cowering away from this bully, trying to make himself small, his eyes darting around and when the bully manhandles him he is thrown to the ground several times and just quivers away from the bigger boy. When I said earlier that Key seems childlike, this scene was where it was most apparent. He looked so tiny and lost and honestly his haircut is just like all my little grade 2 boys' hair so I felt so sorry for him. Incredibly when the bully exits the stage you can see Byeonggu straighten up and realize that he can do something about this particular aggressor. He skips after the guy and in the next scene you can see Byeonggu dragging a trash bag with what we can only assume is the bully's body inside. 

I think, and this is from a really personal standpoint, this play has a lot to say about society and violence and mental health. I haven't seen the original movie yet because I wanted to see the play without the movie version coloring my perceptions but essentially the executive who Byeonggu kidnaps actually ends up being an Alien and after all he's witnessed from humanity he decides we are a race without hope and orders that Earth be destroyed. I can't help but feel that this Alien made his decision not only because of the violent way Byeonggu tortured him, but also because he was able to witness the kind of treatment Byeonggu had experienced at the hands of his father, teachers and peers. Byeonggu is clearly very mentally ill. The abuse he's experienced meant he grew to be someone with good intentions, who was extremely desensitized to violence. It's a really sad commentary on the cycle of abuse that exists in society. While the play was littered with funny moments, and quirky strange scenes, the violent, intense scenes were the one that I walked away with. 

That said it wouldn't be a post written by Min without a sappy wrap up about how amazing Kibum is and why this play made me fall even harder for him. I said this on twitter last night, but I was struggling to put into words what I wanted to say. I really have a lot of respect for Key for doing this play. It was an incredibly difficult undertaking given that he needed to have good comedic timing, he delivered lines that were rapid fire and garbled, spoke Alien languages at times, delivered rambling insane monologues, went from sobbing to smiling to hysterical to neutral rapidly, and had to captivate an audience with only a tiny stage, a few limited props and 3 co-actors. On top of that, this play is going to give Key very little exposure and, I would assume, very little money. What I respect is that Key took on topics that are usually ignored or swept under the rug by society. I'm not going to sit here and say that Key strongly believes in championing mental health and anti-violence, but I think regardless of whether he chose to do this play to challenge himself as an actor or because he just liked the original movie, I love that Key felt passionate enough about this to go out and do it. 

I really just...my love and respect for Key is never ending. He's so talented and his breath-taking performance in this play was just mind blowing. Compared to all the previous work he's done, this would have to be his most serious work yet. Chess was also a bit of a heavy topic, addressing the Cold War and betrayal and heart break between his character and the woman he loves, but Save the Green Earth is definitely a whole new world. I'm not sure if it's just because the play is very much my style since it's really quirky and has elements of horror and thriller while also being funny and strange, but I would highly recommend this to anyone who who enjoys the strange and slightly confronting. I'm going to go see it again, but it might be one of my favorite works from Key so far. 






On a personal note: I found that watching the play was extremely emotional for me because my cousin recently committed suicide. I hadn't seen him since we were children but I heard from my family frequently that he was struggling with mental health issues. My cousin's teachers and parents had trouble understanding him, writing him off as a troublemaker or a bad egg, when he needed help and medication and support. People who struggle with depression or mental disorders need support just in the same way someone with a broken leg or cancer does. Key's character in this play was dealing without having his mother to support him, who was in a coma induced by medications she had taken from the same company the executive worked for. I think mental health is such an important issue and even if it's not the emphasis of the play, I respect Key so so so much for taking on a role that attempts to gain sympathy for someone who's suffered abuse and as a result is extremely mentally unstable. I'm not sure if I'm really making much sense or if I'm kind of rambling, but given that my family has a few people with mental health problems, Kibum choosing to play this character only gives me an even higher opinion of his character.