‘Mother of Him’ asks where a mother’s love ends — if it ends at all — when her son commits unthinkable crime
With one hand, Brenda takes a call, unfurling a set of oversized architectural blueprints across her kitchen table with the other. Juggling work, the single mother tries to get her 8-year-old son, Jason, ready for school.
He barely listens, clutching a game console and demanding ketchup for his omelet.
At first, it reads like an ordinary morning — hurried, distracted, faintly chaotic. But the phone cuts through it, its ring sharp enough to turn heads. Brenda answers. She says nothing. Then she hangs up.
She turns back to her son, coaxing and urging him on, dressing him in a rush. As she pushes him out the door, a burst of camera flashes and the click of shutters close in through the crack in the door. She quickly shuts the door.
Her older son, who raped three women in a single night, is under house arrest.
Where a mother’s love ends — if it ends at all — is the question that inspired Canadian-British screenwriter and playwright Evan Placey to write the searing drama “Mother of Him.”
First staged in 2010, the play premiered in Korea last year and returns with a new Brenda. Actor Jin Seo-yeon, known for her magnetic screen presence and transformative range, takes on the role of a mother navigating the two weeks after her son’s crime.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Jin said the role ranks among the most demanding of her career, alongside her performance in the crime thriller “Believer” (2018) and her completion of a triathlon on tvN’s variety show “Iron Girls” (2024).
“I found it physically and emotionally exhausting from the moment I received the script,” she said. “I knew it would be difficult, but it was even harder than I had braced myself for.”
“The other cast members tell me I’m working on one of the most demanding productions of 2026, so I take comfort in that and just try to do my best.”
After that night, Brenda’s ordinary life collapses: the press camps outside her home; her face appears in newspapers and on television; past incidents are dredged up. She struggles to hold herself together, but her emotions swing beyond her control. One moment, she recoils from her son Matthew in anger and disgust; the next, she finds herself asking, “How could I ever hate him?” Moments later, she cries out, “All that’s left in me is hatred.”
“During rehearsals, I was under extreme stress and fatigue,” Jin said. “There’s so much dialogue to memorize, and the emotions run so deep. I was so immersed I even forgot to pay my bills.”
What sets Placey’s play apart is its focus on the perpetrator’s family — an angle that feels, if not uncomfortable, then quietly controversial.
He said the play was inspired by a real-life incident in which he knew both the perpetrator and his mother.
“The play is fictional, but having that starting place made me think about the relationship between a young man who commits a terrible crime and his mother,” he said. Placey, who attended the Korean production this week, also took part in a post-show talk with the audience.
“Often, when we read about crimes in the news, we think of them as something that happens to other people, over there,” he said. “Well, no, it could happen to us. Everyone has a family. I wanted to make it feel three-dimensional, to make you think: this could be our family.”
Placey said he was struck by the depth of the Korean audiences’ engagement with the play. “What’s really distinctive was how deeply the Koreans here have thought about the story, the characters and their emotional impact,” he said. “I’m generalizing, but I get the sense that family is such an important bedrock of society.”
Over the course of two harrowing weeks, the play lays Brenda’s anguish bare onstage. The glare of public attention falls not on her son but on her, recast as the “Mother of Him” — the woman who raised a monster.
Jin, who is herself the mother of a 9-year-old son, described Brenda as a character who resists easy understanding.
“There were so many moments when I couldn’t relate to her at all. During rehearsals, I kept asking, ‘Why would she do that? I don’t understand. I wouldn’t act that way,’” she said.
“But the truth is, we’re not perfect. When something this devastating happens, how many of us can respond with real clarity or wisdom? You end up making choices that aren’t rational. It’s precisely because she’s so immature and far from perfect that she feels so real.”
The actress said that the play is not meant to offer a moral lesson, but to leave space for conflicting emotions and questions. Playing the role, she said, expanded her own perspective.
“Usually, we don’t want to think about the perpetrator or their family. We don’t want to understand them. We just want to point fingers. But taking on this role made me think beyond that kind of black-and-white logic.”
Still, Jin added, the creative team was careful to avoid framing the perpetrator’s family as victims.
“We were very careful not to go there, not to slip into playing the victim. I tried to hold onto control, even while balancing those explosive, storm-like emotions.”
"Mother of Him" runs through May 17 at the Myeongdong Theater. English subtitles are provided on Thursdays and Sundays, except May 3.
hwangdh@heraldcorp.com
