Hunting the killer, falling into a trap: 'Danforth Was Right' challenges audiences to question what they see

Who is the killer? The moment audiences try to find out, they may find themselves caught in a trap. Director Jang Jin's psychological thriller "Danforth Was Right" is actually asking something else entirely. Known for rapid-fire dialogue and crowd-pleasing humor, Jang has taken a sharply different turn. There are only six moments of levity in the entire play, and just two actors carry 40 pages of lines. A serial killer who murdered 12 people and a brilliant profiler meet seven times, 30 minutes each, and their roles keep shifting throughout.

Jang spoke at a press call held at YES24 Stage in Jongno-gu, Seoul. "With a premiere production, there's always a lot I second-guess myself on — but still, it's gotten off to a good start and we're meeting audiences," he said. "Danforth Was Right" opened June 12.

The play marks the return of Jang's signature style: psychological drama built entirely from dialogue and silence. Set inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, the production features only two actors on stage. The role of Jonas is shared by Park Geon-hyeong, Choi Young-jun and Kang Seung-ho, while the role of John rotates among Ko Sang-ho, Kim Han-gyeol and Lee Hyeon-u. Each casting combination produces a different psychological dynamic — itself a reason to watch more than once.

"Beyond the chase to determine whether the serial killer is guilty or not, something more unfolds in the second half," Jang said. "I hope audiences look forward to the mounting energy and focus the actors bring as the play builds."

The original script featured five characters. "I started writing it as a play eight or nine years ago, but it felt too cinematic, so I rewrote it as a screenplay — and someday I'd like to make it into a film," Jang recalled. The first complete draft included, alongside John and Jonas, a lead investigator, an elderly professor who had looked after the orphaned John like a godfather, and a tipster named Donnie McCarthy. "At some point I decided to stage it as a play first, so I finished the script — and after much deliberation, I changed it to a two-hander," he explained. A film version set in Korea already exists as a separate completed screenplay, Jang added.

The seed of the play was a childhood conversation. "It came from a throwaway joke with some friend I can't even remember — he said, 'I'll tell you how to get rich: wait until the bounty on a violent criminal gets high enough, then turn me in,'" Jang said.

The choice to set the story in New York had no grand intention behind it. "There are parts of the story that veer into excess, and setting it abroad made that easier to handle," he said.

The crimes depicted in the play are fictional. "I read books, looked up case studies and did a lot of imagining," Jang said. To portray the frenzy of a killer who is a former fencing champion, he interviewed an actual national team fencing athlete to ground the portrayal in reality. He asked directly whether repeatedly thrusting a blade hundreds of thousands of times could, amid hallucinations, trigger an involuntary urge to kill. "The athlete said flatly, 'That's a crazy idea' — but as a creator, it was a point worth imagining," Jang said with a laugh.

Jang is best known for black comedy, but he held that back here. "Even a slight misstep could make things feel too light, so I kept the comedy in check," he said. "The actors are calibrating it themselves, staying within the tension the play needs."

Jang was guarded about the ending, calling it "a massive spoiler," but added with ease that since the production runs for several months, the spoiler would not diminish the enjoyment.

The actors had a grueling time, largely because of the sheer volume of lines. "There was a terror to the amount of dialogue in this piece — memorizing 40 pages was a mountain in itself," said Park Geon-hyeong. Kang Seung-ho said he had learned roughly half the lines before rehearsals began. "The two months of following the director's detailed notes were rough, but it was enormously helpful for me as an actor," he said. When the script was condensed from five characters to two, the lines that had belonged to the three cut characters were absorbed by the remaining roles, concentrating the load on each performer.

The process of building the serial killer character was equally striking. "I focused less on the act of killing itself and more on how this person came to be caught, and how he should present himself in front of a profiler," said Ko Sang-ho. Kim Han-gyeol said he took to heart the director's words that "90 percent of the character is in the text." "I started from the idea that a person living with a terminal illness could appear to an ordinary observer like a psychopath, and I referenced a lot of American crime dramas," he said. Lee Hyeon-u said he initially built the character around the archetypal image of a serial killer, but the deeper he dug into the script, the more he realized the same lines could be approached with an entirely different inner state. "That process itself was personally fascinating," he said.

Working with Jang was, by all accounts, equal parts pain and joy. Park Geon-hyeong described the experience as "deeply uncomfortable." "Showing your performance for the first time to the person who wrote and directed the piece — someone who knows everything about it — is not something you can ever feel fully at ease with," he said. "But over those two months of turning that discomfort into comfort, I felt the happiness and the agony of acting at the same time." Ko Sang-ho recalled that his first experience with theater in high school had been a school production of one of Jang's plays. "I had played the lead in that piece, so there was already a strong affinity — and I was drawn to the ending, where both characters are hurtling toward a conclusion with so much left unsaid," he said. Kim Han-gyeol said Jang "doesn't let you cut corners or hold anything back — that can be painful, but once you get through it, the sense of achievement is immense, and I feel like I keep growing as an actor."

The play is not a thriller built around identifying the killer. "The two characters ultimately converge into one," Jang said. Rather than asking audiences to take sides between the profiler and the killer, the play is designed so that following both characters' emotional arcs leads the audience to the same place. The central question is not "who is the killer?" but "is evil discovered, or is it made?" Lee Hyeon-u put it this way: "On the way home after watching the play, I think audiences will find themselves wondering whether they've been living only by what they wanted to see. It makes you reflect on how many assumptions we carry with us through life."