Northern Exposure; Can a musical about the gulag help Korean relations?

Byline: Christian Caryl (With B. J. Lee in Seoul)

A musical set in a concentration camp? Even Lim Jae Chung, the 33-year-old South Korean actor starring in the production, admits it's a tough sell. He plays a camp warden who rapes and impregnates a young female prisoner in "Yoduk Story," a musical about North Korea's gulag, showing in Seoul. "This musical is neither funny nor light," Lim says during a break from rehearsals. "It's heavy. But it has a message of love and forgiveness powerful enough to touch southern youth."

They are not easy to reach. The majority of South Koreans evince a vague sense of good will toward their cousins in the North, and few know or care much about the actual conditions under Kim Jong Il's totalitarian regime. That's partly because the center-left administration of President Roh Moo Hyun has been aggressively pursuing reconciliation with Pyongyang--even if that means downplaying the regime's human-rights abuses. "I suspect this is going to give the [Roh] government some heartburn," says John Hoog, a former U.S. diplomat who now edits an English-language newspaper in Seoul.

In fact, "Yoduk Story" says less about conditions in Kim Jong Il's kingdom than it does about the tortured state of North-South relations. It was written and directed by Jung Sung San, a defector from the North. Raised as the privileged son of a ...