Ben Kim Paplham was born in Busan, South Korea, and adopted into the wild zoo that is De Pere, WI. Their adopted family, the Paplham Clan, raised Ben on animated movies, LOTR, and the sound of lawnmowers at 5 in the morning. Today, Ben is a poet and playwright, a harborer of DnD chaos, a spicy chicken kind of dude, Oscars ballot champion, and a stand-up comic for an audience of themself.
Airplane Wing, 2018, 11 x 17 in., Photo by Ben Kim Paplham
Fire Escape, 2019, 17 x 11 in., Photo by Ben Kim Paplham
Except from "Laura Does Not Cry", 2021., Playscript by Ben Kim Paplham
Laura Does Not Cry… is a performative memory that shares a personal story using Laura from The Glass Menagerie as a representation of the writer. It is not a complete reflection of Ben Kim’s relationship to their disability, but it tells of a moment — no more than a handful of tangible seconds — that radically changed Ben Kim’s understanding of disability. Laura Does Not Cry… functions as two connected but distinct forms: as a poem and as a play — neither superseding the other in value. As a poem, it feeds the individual in intimate comfort; the pages shift back and forth as the reader needs, for the sake of visual recollection. As a play, it invites collaborative storytelling between the actors and the audience; the stage labors to bring back to life the very memories, and memories of fiction, of its container. But even more simply: this is a story about dying.