Moonlight Okinawa

Moonlight Okinawa is a play developed through the 2024 ACC Theater Residency, and the first collaboration between the playwright Jang Young, winner of the 60th Dong-A Theater Awards for Best Play (2023), and director Yoon Hye-sook, recipient of the Doosan Yonkang Arts Award (2020). Centered on Okinawa and Gwangju, two sites charged with meaning in Northeast Asia, the work explores the relationship between two people, their waiting, and the possibility of consolation in a space-time where different times and memories converge.

The performance literally gives form to the quantum mechanical idea that ‘the act of observation transforms potentiality into reality.’ Asking the question, ‘If we believe that intention can shape reality, what can we hope for?’ it unfolds as a sweeping love story that moves across the layers of many worlds. 

The story begins with the playwright Yoon Jong, who has spent twenty years staging a single play, Moonlight, with the belief that anything with even the slightest chance of happening may one day come true. The work imagines a future in which Koharu, his lover who went missing in Okinawa two decades earlier, is still alive. However, Yoon Jong is diagnosed with a terminal illness before ever learning whether Koharu survived. He sets out on one final journey to Okinawa, where he begins writing his last play, Okinawa, imagining that Koharu has already seen Moonlight, the play that foretells her own future.

Playwright Jang Young

2025–26 SPAF Associate Artist

Director Yoon Hye-sook

Yoon Hye-sook is a theater director, head of Rabbit Hole Theater, and a member of the seventh cohort of the theater collective Hyehwa-dong 1-beonji. She majored in Chinese Language and Literature and Psychology as an undergrad at Yonsei University before earning a graduate degree in Performing Arts at Seoul National University. Building on this interdisciplinary background, she has built a distinct aesthetic by tenaciously exploring the relationships among human language, psychology, and the stage. She has created productions that stir the audience’s imagination through densely charged theatrical energy and continues to work on projects that open up the audience’s sensation and thought.

She received the Doosan Yonkang Arts Award in 2020 and the Excellence Award in Theater at the inaugural Seoul Arts Award in 2022, establishing herself as a notable director in the contemporary theater scene. Her major productions include Silver Tongue, Time Difference (2024), Jeong Hee-jeong (2023), SECOND CHANCE (2022), Dry Land, and We Arrived in This City Together (2020).

Produced by ACC

The ACC Theater is a leading platform for the creation and exchange of Asian performing arts, producing experimental works grounded in contemporary discourse across Asia. With its distinctive performance environment, it expands formal innovation and transforms diverse sensibilities and issues of our time into theatrical experience. Through this work, the ACC Theater discovers stories that resonate across generations and cultures, and presents original productions that engage audiences around the world.