Artist Profile: Playwright Sophie Kim On Collaboration, Queerness, and Bringing Visions to Reality

When Sophie H. Kim ’24 watched the opening night performance of “Silver,” a song from their original musical “ISCARIOT,” from the front row of the Agassiz Theater, the song felt different than it felt in rehearsals. The lighting, the costumes, and feeling the audience holding their breath made the experience uniquely emotional for Kim.

“Silver,” a song about feeling used, sung by a queer, poor, Korean Judas Iscariot, reimagines a moment in the New Testament when Judas betrays Jesus Christ for 30 pieces of silver.

In Kim’s version of “ISCARIOT,” which debuted at Harvard in the fall, this act is a dual betrayal: Jesus, who is running for prom king, betrays Judas by taking advantage of his friendship and campaigning skills in order to gain popularity at the rich Los Angeles high school they both attend. Then Judas sings “Silver,” expressing his feelings of being second-best to Jesus.

“Just hearing that sung on stage and being like, ‘yeah, he should know what he’s worth. He definitely should, we all should,’” Kim said.

Staging the Unstageable

Now, Kim is working on a new project — this time even more unconventional.

While “ISCARIOT”’s beginnings were inspired by a heretical Tumblr meme about Jesus curing his disciples’ hangovers, the idea for “SWAN,” Kim’s new project, came in response to a playwriting class’s prompt that asked students to write an unstageable play.

“I wasn’t thinking in a way that was constrained by financials or even how much space am I allowed to take up as an artist,” Kim said. “I was just kind of like, just whatever you want, right? And I think that's how art should be.”

As a result, Kim created their limitlessly creative play “SWAN” — and they were awarded the 2022 Phyllis Anderson Prize for Playwriting by the American Repertory Theater for the play.

“SWAN” follows a young, gay and closeted, Korean-American man and a white, also closeted, moderately famous YouTube video creator, who roleplays being a 1950s housewife. Both characters are haunted by a character named “Swan,” who Kim describes as a mashup between Disney’s Ursula from the Little Mermaid and Tan France from the popular netflix show “Queer Eye.” Swan leads the first two characters through visions of their past and future to portray a message about how they are living their lives.

“You should try to live your authentic lives, even though it's hard and even though they’re all kind of coping with these coping mechanisms and denial,” Kim explained.

The play, set in Los Angeles, also loosely follows the ballet “Swan Lake” and includes ideas from queer theory about how queerness can be like time travel. Kim’s work also emphasizes that people can exist as multiple selves.

“Being closeted throws you out of sync, out of real time, because you’re at once in yourself, but you're also thinking about the past, thinking about the future, and are just sort of thinking of how do I want to exist in the world — while at the same time existing in the world,” Kim said.

Now, in preparation for a theater festival in June, Kim is working with a team of a director, a dramaturg, as well as seating, lighting and costuming teams to figure out how to make this unstageable idea become stageable.

Another challenge is deciding how to portray another concept that’s been on Kim's mind: monsters. “SWAN” aims to reshape the relationship between monstrosity and queerness, which is often used as an insult, as Kim pointed out.

“How can we be more imaginative in the ways that we come to ourselves – the ways that we express ourselves?” Kim said. “What if we're only afraid of monsters and what they represent because they represent a kind of freedom and a knowledge of the self that is scary?”

Performance and Mentorship

Kim has been practicing this kind of thought and introspection for a long time. Kim remembers writing their first short stories in kindergarten and writing poetry in middle school, knowing they wanted to be an artist. Kim began performing slam poetry in high school, eventually becoming the 2018 Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. Their first poem in high school was called “Queerphobia; or Love, Restricted.”

Sophie remembered the excitement of seeing their words resonate with others, as well as the confidence in sharing their words for their own self-expression and empowerment.

“There’s also something really powerful about just getting up there and saying something and being like, ‘you don't have to like it, this is for me at the end of the day,’” they said.

In high school, they joined a Los Angeles-based LGBTQ+ writers’ group called Queerwise, which was originally a group of senior citizens. They invited Kim to join to bring in intergenerational voices, making Kim the youngest participant by far. Together, they would write and perform monologues about different prompts. The experience writing and performing with older LGBTQ+ writers was magical for Kim.

Outside of Queerwise, Kim dabbled in playwriting and submitted their work to their school’s playwrights’ festival. One year, Kim submitted a play about the Rental Family services in Japan, and another year they featured their play about Vincent Van Gogh and time travel. While the plays were only between 10 and 30 minutes long, they gave Kim the chance to work with professional directors and producers to see their visions come to life.

This showed Kim that seeing something through to the end — even through unglamorous activities like sending emails — was something they desired to do in the future.

“Being a part of something larger than yourself”

In the eighth grade, amidst the poetry writing, Kim ran the gay-straight alliance at their middle school in the Beverly Hills area, where they said raising awareness was an “interesting” experience. In the meetings, the group observed the annual GLSEN Day of Silence, organized awareness weeks, planned speeches for school assemblies, and made posters to raise awareness for LGBTQ+ issues.

The identity Kim formed within this group is front and center in Kim’s art today.

“Something that is really exciting to me about queerness that was also exciting to me in middle school,” Kim said, “was just being part of this lineage and this history that these stories that are remembered but also not remembered, and this responsibility, but also this excitement, of being part of something that is larger than yourself.”

—Staff writer Asher J. Montgomery can be reached at asher.montgomery@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @asherjmont.