[News Culture] A long holiday does not necessarily require leaving Seoul. For anyone looking to trade traffic and travel plans for a few hours in a theater, Daehangno offers another kind of Chuseok itinerary.
This season’s choices range widely: a family drama built around a mother and son, an ensemble comedy driven by disguise and insurance fraud, Patrick Marber’s unsparing portrait of modern intimacy, and a two-actor psychological drama centered on memory and identity.
Here are four productions suited to very different kinds of company — including none at all.
With the Family: I Love You, Mom
Set in the 1980s, I Love You, Mom follows a mother raising her son alone while making a living selling fish at a traditional market.
Comedian Cho Hye-ryun directs and also appears in the production, sharing the role of the mother with Lee Kyung-sil, Kim Ji-sun and Kim Hyo-jin.
The play has remained in circulation since its 2019 premiere and expanded beyond Daehangno after Cho took a more central creative role in the production in 2024. It later traveled to Los Angeles and Sydney.
Its appeal lies less in turning maternal sacrifice into sentiment than in revisiting the everyday relationships families often stop noticing precisely because they are so familiar. Against the backdrop of an earlier generation’s working life, the play asks what remains unspoken between parents and children until enough time has passed to make those silences visible.
Through: Oct. 25
Venue: Art House, Dongsung-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul
For Couples: The Secret of Flowers
Jang Jin’s The Secret of Flowers begins with an absurdly practical problem.
In the rural northwestern Italian village of Villaperosa, a group of wives suddenly find themselves without their husbands — and with a substantial insurance payout at stake. Their solution sets off a farce built on impersonation, deception and increasingly precarious attempts to keep the scheme intact.
The 2026 production gives the comedy an additional theatrical twist by alternating female and male casts in the roles of the wives.
Jung Kyung-soon, Choo Kwi-jung, Hwang Seok-jung, Yoo Sun, Park Ha-sun, Kyung Soo-jin, Han Soo-a and Shin Seul-ki are among the actresses appearing in the female cast, while Sung Ji-ru, Jung Woong-in, Kang Eun-bin and Lim Mo-yoon take on the same world from the male lineup.
The device is not simply a change of casting. Much of the comedy already depends on performance within performance: characters assume identities, bodies become part of the deception, and the audience is asked to accept increasingly elaborate theatrical lies. Changing who plays the wives makes that instability part of the production itself.
The play runs for roughly two hours without an intermission, sustaining the pace of Jang’s dialogue-driven comedy as one complication gives way to the next.
Through: Nov. 29
Venue: Link Art Center, Hyehwa-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul
For a Date: Closer
Patrick Marber’s Closer is a more dangerous choice for date night — which may also make it the most interesting one.
The play follows four people in 1990s London — Larry, Anna, Dan and Alice — as attraction brings them together and desire, jealousy, dishonesty and betrayal repeatedly pull them apart.
First staged in London in 1997, Marber’s play reached Broadway in 1999 and later became the 2004 Mike Nichols film starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen.
Korean audiences have encountered Closer repeatedly since its local premiere in 2006, with actors including Moon Geun-young, Uhm Ki-joon, Jin Kyung, Lee Yoon-ji, Shin Sung-rok, Jin Se-yeon, Park So-dam, Kim Seon-ho, Park Eun-seok, Kim So-jin and Seo Hyun-woo appearing in previous seasons.
The 2026 cast includes Oh Man-seok, Bae Soo-bin, Choi Kang-hee, Lisa, Hong Woo-jin, Jang Hee-jin, Jeon Sung-min, Hong Jong-hyun, Kang Young-seok, So Ju-yeon, Lee Do-yoon and Lee Na-eun.
What has kept the play alive is not simply its romantic geometry. Closer is interested in the gap between intimacy and possession — in how quickly the desire to know another person can become the desire to control what they reveal.
Its characters fall in love, lie, demand honesty and then discover that truth does not necessarily make their relationships easier to survive.
For couples — established or otherwise — it is not exactly reassuring holiday entertainment.
That is part of the point.
Through: Dec. 6
Venue: YES24 Stage, Dongsung-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Going Solo: Alter Ego(s)
For a solo theater trip, Alter Ego(s) offers the most concentrated acting showcase of the four.
Written by French playwrights Cédric Chapuis and Margot Mouth and inspired by the life of Billy Milligan, the two-hander begins with Stanley, a man living with gaps in his memory, and Wilbur, the psychiatrist attempting to understand what lies behind them.
As their sessions progress, fragmented memories and distinct identities surface through Stanley, pushing the play away from a conventional clinical narrative and toward questions of memory, identity and psychological survival.
Lee Jae-kyun, Lee Hwi-jong and Jung Hwi alternate as Stanley. Without relying on extensive costume or makeup changes, each actor must move rapidly among sharply different physical and emotional states through shifts in gaze, posture, breath and vocal rhythm.
Kim Jung-min, Hwang Eun-hoo and Son Ji-yoon share the role of Wilbur, whose exchanges with Stanley provide the structural anchor as buried memories begin to emerge.
The production takes inspiration from a real-life case, but its theatrical interest lies less in reconstructing that history than in examining what happens when memory becomes unbearable and the mind develops ways of surviving what cannot easily be integrated.
That places unusual weight on the actors. With only two performers carrying the stage, minute physical changes become narrative events, and Stanley’s transitions must register without allowing the technique itself to overwhelm the character.
For an audience member coming alone, it is the kind of production that rewards close attention rather than shared reaction — an 80-minute encounter built around watching performance at its most exposed.
Through: Nov. 22
Venue: YES24 Stage, Dongsung-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul
Four productions, four very different reasons to spend part of the Chuseok holiday in Daehangno. One looks back at family, another turns theatrical deception into comedy, Closer makes romance considerably less comfortable, and Alter Ego(s) reduces theater to an intense exchange between two performers.
The choice depends largely on who is sitting beside you.
And in one case, no one needs to be.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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