RSVP: https://forms.gle/af94G9LM4etjQhcZ7
Masil Theater invites you to the first reading performance of Shimcheonggil Secret Recipe, a new community-based performance created from the lives and memories of Korean immigrants in the Bay Area.
Shimcheonggil Secret Recipe began through interviews and workshops with first-generation Korean immigrants and seniors. The immigrant participants we met at K Center, who are the protagonists of this performance, shared stories they had not been able to easily tell the world. Memories of loneliness and hardship while living in an unfamiliar land, failure and wounds, longing and responsibility toward family, and the love and connection that allowed them to continue living despite everything became the seeds of this work.
This performance does not simply use immigrant stories as its subject matter. The life memories directly shared by Korean immigrants become the foundation of the script, and Korean community actors from multiple generations share those stories together on stage. This performance begins with the life stories of immigrants, is expressed through the bodies and voices of immigrants as they become actors, and is completed when immigrants once again become the audience.
For more than twenty years, Masil Theater has created performances based on the stories of communities. In the small rural village of Gokseong, South Korea, Masil Theater listened to the lives of elderly women who had spent their entire lives there and completed the performance together with local residents. That work, in which residents across generations, from teenagers to grandmothers, participated directly as actors, showed that personal memory can become community memory, and that the stage can become a place where people can comfort and connect with one another.
Now, Masil Theater hopes to continue that approach to working with the Korean immigrant community in California.
Today, Korean culture is loved around the world through K-pop, K-dramas, and film. However, the real lives of Korean immigrants who have lived in the United States still remain insufficiently told. Behind stories of success are loneliness, labor, sacrifice, language barriers, responsibility toward family, and a quiet but powerful time of survival.
Shimcheonggil Secret Recipe invites those voices of life, which have not been easily heard, onto the stage.
This reading performance is not a presentation of a completed production, but a first opportunity to share the creative process so far with the audience. Through this time, we hope that the memories of Korean immigrants will meet one another, generations will connect, and each person will be able to discover the “secret recipe” hidden within their own life.
We welcome those who have lived as immigrants, those who have watched the lives of their immigrant parents closely, and anyone who wishes to listen to the stories of people living in a new land.
When your memories and hearts join us, this performance becomes even deeper.
Performance Information
Performance Title: Shimcheonggil Secret Recipe Reading Performance
Date & Time: Thursday, July 2, 2026, at 2:00 PM
Venue: Korean American Community Services Senior Center
Address: 1000 S Bascom Ave, San Jose, CA 95128, United States
Hosted and Produced by: Masil Theater
Supported by: Blossom Avenue Arts Collective, California Arts Council
In Collaboration with: K Center
RSVP: https://forms.gle/af94G9LM4etjQhcZ7
