As life becomes tougher and fiercer, the words ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Happiness’ are also gradually drifting away from us. Most people would agree that happiness is an important factor in their lives. However, it’s not easy to live a constantly happy life even though people may be aware of it. For those people who are going through these difficulties, I recommend a play called, Happiness. This play brings back the forgotten emotions of gratitude and bliss. Moreover, through this play, people will remember to be thankful for the small things that they may have simply let pass. They might even learn the true meaning of happiness. The play is an impressive 90-minute story performed on the smallest stage in Daehakroe. Let’s start listening to the ‘Thankful’ and ‘Happy’ story.
  The play deals with a love story between a man who’s suffering from Alzheimers and a woman who has a rare disease that will lead to her death if she cries or laughs excessively. These are the two characters in this play. He is a husband who once was a hot boxer but now runs a chauffeur service and dreams of a comeback in boxing through a boxing survival program. She is his wife whose dream is to be a children's book author.
  While having a sweet new marriage, they receive horrible news from the hospital. The husband finds out that his wife has a rare disease, and the wife finds out her husband has Alzheimers disease. After discovering this bizarre news, the wife buys her husband some Alzheimer drugs under the pretense that they are multi-vitamins, and the husband purchases an emergency kit for his wife. Their marriage goes on with each hiding their disease from the other. 
  As time goes on, the husband’s will to win in his last survival boxing competition gets stronger but his health gets worse. His wife lives in grief from day to day seeing her husband losing his memory and repeating what he has said. A few days later, the husband finds out about his disease from his mother-in-law and plans a wonderful proposal before it’s too late. While he is making the proposal, he forgets where he hid the ring so he ends up not giving it to his wife. Nevertheless, his wife feels massive gratitude and happiness from his sincere effort. On the final match day, he leaves early for his fight but his wife gets a message from his coach that he hasn’t arrived yet. For the entire day she searches for her husband, and when she finally gets home extremely exhausted, she finds her husband at home. Full of emotion, she cries out his name but he can’t remember her since his disease has gotten much worse. Immense shock engulfs her and she wails out loud. Her disease flares up and clogs her airway and puts her in grave danger. At this moment, her husband gains his memory back and tries to find the emergency kit he had bought to help her but he can’t remember where he put it. As a result, she is taken by ambulance to a hospital. Fortunately, she avoids death, but her husband loses all of his memory. After recovering her health, she tries to bring his memory back by re-enacting things they’ve done together but his memories never come back. She finally determines to just be thankful for the fact that her husband is still next to her and tries to make new memories with him. 
  Before seeing the play, I was a little bit disappointed at seeing the small stage in Daehakroe. But as the play began, the flawless acting was powerful enough to mesmerize the whole theatre and hold the audience’s attention. Additionally, the song ‘Gratitude’ by Kim, Dongryeul was used as background music and several parts of the scenes included actors singing the songs live. This led the audience to listen carefully to every part of the lyrics. The collaboration between each scene and the music was deeply touching and was another significant point of the play. So, what is the message of this play? As you can tell from the background music, the play is about ‘Gratitude’ and ‘Happiness’. Some people may think of this theme as a cliché, but we need to think of the reason why people are so attracted to this play. Maybe it’s because we are not really expressing our gratitude and happiness often enough. Let’s think about how often we express our gratitude and happiness to people around us. If it’s difficult to answer positively, I ardently recommend that you go and see the play, Happiness. Because the moment you get used to the happiness given to you, it is going to be harder for you to feel happiness.