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Review By Off the Shelf Correspondent Andy Hoffman
Lloyd Suh has written in The Heart Sellers, a play that will run in repertory theaters around the country for the next generation. You can see it now at the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theatre.
Review of The Heart Sellers, a play by Lloyd Suh at the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theater through December 23, 2023
The Heart Sellers concerns two women in an unnamed city in the United States on the evening of November 22, 1973, Thanksgiving, the night that Richard Nixon delivered his “I am not a crook” speech to a national audience. The women have come to the US accompanying their husbands, both physicians doing their training rotations at a nearby university hospital.
The play opens with Luna bringing Jane into her modest apartment, carrying a turkey for the holiday meal. Luna is voluble, words – Jane is Korean and Luna is Filipino – spilling from her in a torrent, as though she’s locked them away for too long. She tells Jane that they both sit in the same boat, foreigners without a clear reason for living where and as they do, except for the men they have married. While the play has more of an arc than a plot, it keeps moving forward through deep laughter and thoughtful silences.
Jane volunteers that she knows how to cook a turkey because she has watched Julia Child cook one on TV. In fact, watching television forms the bulk of Jane’s life. Fortunately, she has learned some English from the experience, and she can communicate, albeit haltingly, with Luna in this language. The frozen turkey won’t cook in time for a Thanksgiving meal, but the women make do with yams and lots of wine.
What begins as an awkward meeting in the supermarket becomes a foundational evening of confessions. Luna has stalked Jane, in hopes of creating a friendship. Jane’s husband has warned her against befriending Luna; he would prefer she make friends with American women. They joke about going to see a porn film, so they can compare the size of their husband’s penises with other men, since neither has seen any others, but they quickly realize how recognizable they have become as the wives of doctors admitted to the United States under the terms of the Hart-Celler Act.
Luna plays with the language and imagines several heart-sellers, realizing over the course of the night that they have sold their futures in their native lands – where they have left their hearts – to have an unknown and perhaps undesirable future in America. The Philippines under the Marcos regime might not welcome Luna and her husband back. Jane has almost no family left in Korea, her sister and parents having died mysteriously, perhaps due to their communist sympathies.
The two women, Jane and Luna, have seen their lives play out in political contexts around the globe. They have come together, as Luna explains, in large part because of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, that removed national-origins quota from US immigration policy and paved the way for these women to meet. Also known as the Hart-Celler Act for the congressmen who sponsored it, this change in policy establishes the political context for the play. Whatever the politics, the audience becomes witness to the birth of a meaningful friendship between people from different corners of the world, in yet another corner.
The Heart Sellers reveals Jane and Luna’s surface and deep similarities, especially their passive roles in the political drama around them. This play, with only two characters and simple set, will prove attractive to theaters everywhere, especially since audiences hunger for depictions of true minority experiences.
The Huntington’s production, directed by May Adrales, imbues an authenticity to the lives of Luna and Jane. Interestingly, the set, by Junghyun Georgia Lee, looks like a television, raised off the stage floor and bordered in black, offering a counterpoint between the real-life sense we have of the blossoming friendship and the artifice of lives lived in a political and public context beyond the hands of the principals.
In the sumptuous program – a significant improvement Loretta Greco has brought to the Huntington since becoming Artistic director, Lloyd Suh notes, “I never thought of this as, ‘I’m writing a play about immigrant women.’ I thought of it as ‘I’m writing a play about my mother.’ Suddenly you become the only person who can tell that story.” As a result, his play will make you laugh, and it will make you think. In a nation of immigrants, this story belongs to everyone.
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Thanks for this, especially your summary of the play. We saw it last night, and I must begin by saying that having Luna speak with the speed of the warnings that come at the end of a drug commercial made the play almost a joke for those of us who don’t have the greatest hearing. I realize that the characterization was intentional, but it also meant that I understood about 40% (at best), and my wife even less. I’ll also observe that the 2 minute “trailer” of the Milwaukee version (on YouTube) reveals that Luna’s monologues could be made understandable in the right director’s hands.
As to the actual review, I agree that there is something powerful and deep about what the women tell us about themselves, about their homelands, and especially about their concerns, for example, there’s the wonderful insight into the women worrying about having to “sell their hearts” when they come into America.
But at the same time, there’s a strange characterization of the two women as somewhat silly drunks that doesn’t necessarily serve them well, as if the playwright is conceding that people like his mother are a kind of thoughtful “trifle.” Indeed, between Luna’s rat-tat-tat delivery style, and their foolish efforts to cook a frozen turkey, I found the play conveyed more of a White American’s stereotyping of Asians than a deeper look inside their brains. Knowing that the play was written by an acclaimed Asian American playwright left me wondering if this is truly how he thinks of his mother (in fact, which character was like his mother?)
I see that the critics all have raves (although Joyce Kulhawik did acknowledge that it was hard to understand the actresses, at least at the beginning), so I may well be in the minority, but to be honest, this all leads me to wanting to read Suh’s play so that 9 might better understand what I saw.
lUnfortunately child only understand 1/2 of what was being said. The play was very interesting and concerns all immigrants. Being a white Jewish immigrant having been transplanted twice it was easy to feel their loneliness.
Please have the actresses speak slower so the audience does not have to guess what they are saying.