This is a story about three women trying to escape to New York. Of the two who make it, only one is real.

Mia Chung is the playwright of “You for Me for You,” a world premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company on Nov. 5. The play focuses on two sisters from North Korea who attempt to sneak out of their homeland and move to America. One sister gets left behind.

Before Chung could write this play — before she was even a playwright — she was living in Los Angeles. By day, she worked a handful of assistant jobs. By night, she wrote screenplays. And really the only problem with this existence was that she hated L.A., and also her screenplays were terrible.

She’d always wanted to be a writer, but this L.A. thing just wasn’t panning out. Even though Chung had enjoyed a stint working for HBO at the Comedy Arts Festival, she wasn’t so sure sketch comedy was really for her. It was a lifestyle she wasn’t entirely psyched to adopt, and the sketches themselves were unsatisfying. “You write it, it goes up,” she recalled. “It’s almost like you sneezed and it was gone.”

While her screenwriting career was one dead-on-arrival draft after another, her playwriting track record tells a significantly brighter story: she's had work developed all over the country, from the Doorway Arts Ensemble in Silver Spring to the Icicle Creek Theatre Festivalin Leavenworth, Wash. to the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival. “You for Me” will move to Boston’s Company One after its Woolly run.

When her husband took a position at Brown University in 2008, Chung enrolled in a graduate playwriting program there, first as a guest and then full time. Her thesis play, which would ultimately become “You for Me,” was inspired in large part by two events in the summer of 2009: Euna Lee and Laura Ling, two Asian American journalists were captured at the North Korean border (Bill Clinton negotiated their release) and Jaycee Dugard, who had been kidnapped as a child and held against her will for 18 years, was discovered in Northern California.

Chung grew up in San Diego, but her parents were born and raised in South Korea, so Chung has always felt fascinated by and yet foreign from the goings-on in North Korea.

“Whenever North Korea is in the news, I’m always interested,” she said. “Because especially [when] I was growing up, I had a very limited understanding of North Korea. Essentially my understanding was from Western media, which is somewhat propagandistic, and my parents. My dad would just write North Korea off.”

“Up until that point [in 2009],” she said. “The only question I had in mind was: why hasn’t it fallen apart, and when is it going to?”

Learning about Jaycee Dugard and her sympathy toward her jailers introduced Chung to the concept of Stockholm syndrome, the psychological phenomenon wherein hostages bond with and even grow to care for their captors.

That knowledge “gave me the paradigm for understanding North Korea,” said Chung. “Because the social control [there] is so based on concepts of family and loyalty.” Instead of assuming North Korea’s demise was imminent, said Chung, “The new question was: Will this ever fall apart?”

“You for Me” is the first play funded by Woolly’s Free the Beast campaign, which aims to produce 25 new plays over the next 10 years.