Jeon So-min steps into Lungs for a tense 95-minute two-hander

Jeon So-min will meet theater audiences in the female role of the play 'Lungs.' The production runs from May 23, 2026, through August 2, 2026, at Chungmu Art Center's Junggeukjang Black, where two actors carry the full 95-minute performance through dialogue, silence and the compressed passage of a relationship.

The focus is not simply the familiar variety-show energy that viewers associate with Jeon So-min. In 'Lungs,' the key question is how she reacts onstage. The female role is introduced as a person whose thoughts keep shifting as she moves between the practical realities of love, judgments about childbirth and the future, and the anxiety and compulsion of wanting to be a good person.

The Chungmu Art Center run begins on May 23, 2026. 'Lungs' is the ninth production in 'Yeongeukyeoljeon 10,' the 20th anniversary season of Yeongeukyeoljeon. The performance period is May 23 to August 2, 2026, and the venue is Chungmu Art Center's Junggeukjang Black. The running time is 95 minutes, and admission is open to audiences aged 14 and older.

The work builds its intensity less by stacking major incidents than by the speed of the words exchanged between two people and by the silences that interrupt them. Instead of waiting for the next event, the audience follows how the same question lands differently on each character and how those differences reshape the relationship in real time.

The announced casting sets up a triple-cast structure for both roles. Lim Ju-hwan, Park Sung-hoon and Kim Kyung-nam play the male role, while Jung Woon-sun, Jeon So-min and Shin Yoon-ji play the female role. Within that lineup, Jeon So-min appears onstage as the female role.

In 'Lungs,' the female role is not a simple romantic counterpart. She is a character who repeatedly rebuilds her judgment between the wish to be a good person and the concrete pressures of love. The role demands more than the ability to deliver long passages quickly; it also requires the actor to show the exact instant when a thought changes inside a single sentence.

Jeon So-min's quick responsiveness, familiar from her variety work, could become an asset onstage. At the same time, this play places more weight on finely reducing the speed at which emotion shifts in response to the other person's words than on releasing emotion in a large outburst.

'Lungs' is a work by British writer Duncan Macmillan. It begins from conversations between a couple about love, childbirth, the future and the environment. The public description of the work foregrounds the question of whether it is right to have a child on an Earth already saturated by a population of 8.3 billion.

That social question is tied onstage to private arguments between two people. Jeon So-min's female role stands directly on that boundary. The challenge of the production is not for the actor to explain the emotions loudly, but to make convincing the process by which personal anxiety and generational questions move back and forth inside one character.

This season proceeds through combinations of three actors in the male role and three actors in the female role. Even with the same script, the temperature of each scene can change when the scene partner changes. Audiences selecting a Jeon So-min performance may also want to check whether she is paired with Lim Ju-hwan, Park Sung-hoon or Kim Kyung-nam.

What audiences will see in the actual performance is tied to those combinations. The impression of the production will depend on whether the actors can maintain the tension of speech for 95 minutes, whether the center of the female role remains steady even when the scene partner changes, and whether, by the latter half, the questions raised by 'Lungs' remain more strongly than Jeon So-min's name itself.

Jeon So-min took time to recharge for acting after her final recording of 'Running Man' on October 30, 2023. Following the 2025 play 'Praise of Death,' she is continuing to build stage experience with 'Lungs.' Assessment of this production is likely to become clearer as the remaining performances accumulate stability and audience response. The run continues until August 2, 2026.