Review: Zoë Kim’s Did You Eat? Makes Theater an Act of Self-Love

The story Zoë Kim details in her solo show Did You Eat?, now running in the Public’s black-box Shiva Theater, goes from tragic to shocking—especially with every gnawing reminder that you’re watching a work of autobiography.

Kim spends 65 minutes marching through each chapter of her life: from her unwanted birth as a daughter to Korean parents who only ever wanted a son; to her childhood marked by confidence-shattering criticism and neglect; to her adolescence of mental torment and her father’s near-fatal physical abuse. The only example of parental nurturing Kim can rustle up is the memory of her mother posing the title question, “Did you eat?,” her stand-in for everything from “How are you?” to “I love you.”

The performance is moving by virtue of its existence: the victim of all these atrocities is stepping onto a stage before your eyes as a survivor of them. The piece’s theatrical packaging, however, ends up feeling more like distracting ornamentation than a vessel that can take us to greater depths of feeling.

The conceit throughout, crafted in collaboration with director Chris Yejin, smacks of a therapeutic exercise. Kim tells her story entirely in the second person, addressing a glowing orb that gives physical presence to her inner child. She even greets it with the manic energy of Ms. Rachel. “Look! All these people showed up for you!” she shouts, cheering on this fragile ball of light. It’s very sweet, if not a bit treacly. Of course, sugar is hard to come by in a story that so often burns with vinegar, so the taste dissipates quickly.

The remainder of the performance is crafted around Iris McCloughan’s choreography. Every line is paired with athletic, interpretive movement, giving the piece an aura of beat poetry that its language doesn’t always energetically match (Minjoo Kim’s lighting cues and Yee Eun Nam’s projection designs accent these finely curated beats).

Language, however, is worth noting. Every so often, Kim slips into her native Korean, either for a culture-specific joke or to re-create dialogue between her and her parents. She, as a performer, is most vibrantly alive in these moments—a perhaps unintended but still powerful addition to her reflections on being a teenager in an American boarding school. It would be presumptuous to assume that Korean allows for Kim’s most authentic expression of selfhood, but it certainly shows another layer of selfhood that’s otherwise shrouded in manicured, English prose.

“Manicured” might be the best word to describe the piece. It’s a story of monumental trauma. A child abused and abandoned in every way by all the adults entrusted with her care. And yet, for the sake of fitting a traditional narrative arc, we’re given a speedy off-ramp to love and safety by the deus ex machina appearance of Kim’s now-husband (and admittedly adorable dog). Hope is a desperately needed ingredient by the end of Did You Eat?, but it loses its buoyancy if it feels like just another piece of choreography.