The musical tells the tragic love story of a female inmate and a prison guard and is set in Yodok, the more common spelling of the musical's ''Yoduk" and site of an actual camp about 70 miles northeast of Pyongyang.
The story may sound implausible, but its author and director, 38-year-old Jung Sung San, is a defector from North Korea who says his father was killed in a prison camp.
''Yoduk Story" offers a glimpse into a gulag which the US State Department estimates holds up to 200,000 political prisoners.
According to a group run by a prominent defector, many North Korean prisoners are forced to toil for over 15 hours a day, survive on just 12-17 ounces of corn and salt, and die from malnutrition, pneumonia, or tuberculosis.
The author-director told the Associated Press in an interview that he wanted to highlight human rights in North Korea ''through the lives of people who die miserably for crimes that are not really crimes."
''There are still so many people dying in North Korea's prison camps," said Jung, who defected to the South in 1995 after escaping from a camp where he had been sent for secretly listening to South Korean broadcasts.
Getting his message out was harder than he expected.
Some investors pulled out of the project, and a theater where the musical was to be staged canceled at the last minute. To finance the play, Jung says, he even had to offer his left kidney as collateral for a black-market loan of $20,600. He says he will have to give up the organ if he can't pay up by next month.
He said the biggest obstacle came from South Korean government officials, who he claims threatened to cancel the show and demanded changes in its depiction of North Korean life.
The government denies it. ''We have called all related government offices, but confirmed no official made contacts" with Jung, said Cho Yong-sik, an official at the Unification Ministry, which deals with North Korean affairs. ''A performance is an expression of art and we have no reason to interfere."
Still, the criticism of Kim Jong Il's regime hits a nerve for the South Korean government, which is regularly accused by activists of keeping silent for the sake of detente.
