A Study Guide for Julia Cho's "BFE"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Julia Cho's "BFE", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410393531

Book preview

17

BFE

Julia Cho

2005

Introduction

BFE is a comedic play by Julia Cho, who uses dark humor to address serious subjects. In this work, Cho blends humor with surrealism in a coming-of-age story in which the main character is surrounded by danger and murder. The play was first produced in 2005. Set in the Arizona desert, BFE is one of Cho's desert plays and is based on the author's adolescence. The title is a slang expression referring to the middle of nowhere or the boondocks. One of Cho's earlier works, the play examines the theme of isolation and the effects of an image-obsessed society on people who do not meet cultural standards of beauty. BFE was published by Dramatists Play Service in 2006.

Author Biography

Cho Was Born In 1975 In Los Angeles, California, The Child Of Korean Immigrants. The Family Moved To Arizona When She Was Twelve And Lived There Until She Was Sixteen, According To Her Interview With Sung Rno In American Theater. The landscape of the Arizona desert became a setting for several of her early plays, including BFE, because these years were, she tells Rno, "the most impressionable period of adolescence."

Cho developed a love of theater as a teen ager, but she did not immediately pursue a career in the theater. She graduated from Amherst College in 1996 with a bachelor of arts degree in English. She went on to earn a master's degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley and then completed a master of fine arts degree at New York University. She was a 2001–2002 Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwright fellow at the Juilliard School. During the fellowship, Cho wrote 99 Histories and BFE. The New York Theater Workshop commissioned BFE in 2001, but the play was not produced until 2005, following the 2004 premiere of The Architecture of Loss. Durango followed in 2006. These three plays all take place in the Arizona desert.

Cho continued writing popular plays, including The Piano Teacher in 2007 and The Language Archive in 2010. The Language Archive won the