Should we have a child?
In an age when bringing one child into the world generates ten thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide,
this most intimate of questions is where the play <Lungs> begins.
A story that opens with a couple debating whether to have a child
ultimately stretches toward a far larger question: "Are we good people?"
A Space Filled with Gesture
<Lungs> confronts head-on the moral dilemmas surrounding the climate crisis, environmental destruction, and the act of bringing a life into the world — questions humanity has long carried — yet it never forces an answer. Instead, it simply holds up a transparent mirror to the conflicts within us that cannot be reduced to a simple binary of good and bad.
Since its world premiere at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2011, the play has been produced in Korea by Yeonkeukyeoljeon and is now in its third run. Playwright Duncan Macmillan is also the writer of <Every Brilliant Thing>, another minimalist work currently running on Broadway. Where that piece is carried entirely by a single actor's monologue, <Lungs> pushes the same experiment in the opposite direction — depicting the full arc of a couple's life together with just two people, no props, and no set changes. Through this extreme minimalism, the production tests the essential power of theatre as a medium. On a bare stage, time passes for the audience through the sheer energy of the actors alone. A performer's gesture becomes a fast-forward button, leaping across years in an instant.
What holds up this stage with nowhere to hide is nothing but the breathless torrent of words between two actors. The lives of the couple, traced on a circular stage resembling a clock face, are full of turns. They clash and reconcile without end, crossing the thresholds of life again and again. Each time, shoes are put on and taken off. The shoes left behind where they fell remain on stage, accumulating until the curtain comes down.
The Struggle to Be Good
Through this extreme restraint, <Lungs> asks anew what theatre, as a medium, fundamentally depends on to exist. Time flows for the audience through the actors' energy alone, and the footprints that mark the passage of that time become at once the traces of two lives lived and the very footprint humanity leaves upon the earth.
The vast discourses of environment and ethics dissolve naturally into the love, loss, and anxiety of one couple, reaching the audience without effort. In this way, the work fulfils theatre's capacity to educate without ever preaching. It holds up the question — "Are we truly good people?" — like a mirror, drawing the audience into quiet reflection.
There is something sublime in the sight of human beings who, simply by existing, cannot help but burden the earth, yet who nonetheless struggle ceaselessly to become better.
Refusing to remain a simple piece of environmental theatre, <Lungs> quietly asks those of us living in the same moment why we keep striving to be better people, to live better lives. The moment the curtain falls and the ragged breathing of the two figures on stage finally stills, the audience's own deep breath begins.
※ This review is based on a performance featuring Kim Kyungnam and Shin Yunji.
Lungs runs until 2 August at Chungmu Art Center's Mid-sized Theater Black.
Explore the production history of Lungs by Duncan Macmillan here:
