Jaemi Theatre: Baal

Baal is a dystopian developmental staged reading set in a city plagued by slime rain and strict reproductive control. This project was originally conceived and submitted as a full production, but due to the one-day setup limitation and condensed runtime, it has been revised into a staged reading format to focus on text, rhythm, and performance development.

In this hostile environment, citizens must wear protective suits, and pregnancies are monitored or terminated by the government. When a nonbinary doctor named Kehlani discovers they are carrying a child with their partner, they are forced to choose between obedience to the system and the act of care. The city’s collapsing ecosystem, government corruption, and weaponized misinformation collide with the intimacy of pregnancy, creating a volatile emotional and political landscape.

This staged reading integrates fragments of news broadcasts, children’s programming, and bureaucratic procedures. Blending dark humor and horror, satire and sincerity, the piece explores nontraditional family structures and modes of care under oppressive systems. It raises questions of bodily autonomy, public health, surveillance, gender, and the politicization of birth and grief.

Rather than offering a single protagonist, Baal assembles a chorus of medical workers, politicians, patients, and civilians, each navigating fear, ethics, and impossible choices. Their conversations oscillate between absurdity and desperation, tenderness and violence. By dramatizing the bureaucratization of pregnancy in a disaster state, the piece asks: Does the government have the right to regulate the body? Who gets to decide whose life is worth protecting? What are the costs of survival under biopolitical regimes?

Formally, the reading employs fragmented text, overlapping voices, and minimal physical gesture to evoke the disorientation of crisis. With sparse visual cues and an emphasis on vocal rhythm, the reading invites audiences to imagine sterile hospital interiors and rain-drenched ruins rather than showing them.

Baal is the first reading project by Jaemi Theatre, a new AAPI-led experimental performance initiative based in Washington, DC. “Jaemi” is a Korean word meaning both “fun” and, in its Sino-Korean form 在美, “to live in America” and “to live in beauty.” Through this staged reading, Jaemi Theatre continues its mission to create interdisciplinary performance rooted in diasporic imagination, collective care, and radical storytelling.

Runtime: approximately 75 minutes Audience: 18 and older (adults only) Content Advisory: references to loss, grief, pregnancy, and climate anxiety

Jaemi Theatre is a newly formed performance initiative that views theatre as a space for interruption, speculation, and embodied re-imagination. Led by Korean diasporic artists and based in Washington, DC, the company explores experimental modes of storytelling that merge live performance with visual media, sound, and linguistic friction.

The name “Jaemi” carries layered meanings: in Korean, it means joy or amusement, while its Sino-Korean root 在美 also means “to live in the United States” and “to live in beauty.” This

multivalence reflects the company’s ethos: to create work that is playful, critical, and grounded in the complexity of diasporic experience. Rather than presenting singular narratives of assimilation or representation, Jaemi Theatre exposes the seams of those narratives, asking what kinds of stories can emerge from fragmentation, translation, and technological mediation.

Our process combines text-based dramaturgy with sound design, visual composition, and research materials. We are interested in how performance stages tension between language and body, screen and stage, history and memory. Each work is approached as an open structure assembled through experimentation rather than imposed form.

Baal is currently in its development phase as a staged reading, designed for black box and studio environments. Future iterations will expand its relationship between text, image, and sound toward a fully realized production.

While Jaemi Theatre is not yet a formal nonprofit entity, it operates as a project-based platform led by an experienced director and teaching artist, collaborating with BIPOC and immigrant artists across performance, visual art, and sound. The company is committed to equitable practices and cross-disciplinary collaboration and is seeking project-specific support through partnerships and grants, including potential funding from the Korean Arts Council.

Ultimately, Jaemi Theatre is a home for the unfinished and the unassimilated where glitch, ghost, and excess are not problems to solve but textures to inhabit. We believe performance can hold contradiction without needing to resolve it. That is where we find beauty. That is where we find 재미.