Alone together in a new world
At the Huntington, Lloyd Suh’s ‘The Heart Sellers’ illuminates the assimilation experience of two Asian immigrants in 1970s America
Nothing much happens in Lloyd Suh’s “The Heart Sellers.” Nothing, that is, unless you count the journey by two young women from strangers to friends, a bond that helps them combat the loneliness and isolation they feel as Asian immigrants to the United States, while inspiring them to give voice to their hopes for the rest of their lives.
In other words, a lot happens.
Theater-makers talk often about telling stories that merge the epic and the intimate. There aren’t many contemporary playwrights better at that tricky balancing act than Suh, the son of Korean immigrants.
His “The Chinese Lady” — also a two-hander, presented a year ago at Cambridge’s Central Square Theater — dramatizes the history of discrimination against Asian Americans through the real-life experiences of Afong Moy, who was transported from China to New York in 1834 at the age of 14 and put on display in a museum, serving as a living exhibit, a role she had to fulfill for years before disappearing from public view.
The context for “The Heart Sellers” is not as dramatic as that — how could it be? — but Suh’s play is similarly built on a blend of specificity and universality. Under the sensitive and sure-handed direction of May Adrales at the Huntington, “The Heart Sellers” is moving but not maudlin, and often quite funny, as it illuminates aspects of the immigrant experience.
As the play opens, Luna (Jenna Agbayani), an immigrant from the Philippines, and Jane (Judy Song), an immigrant from Korea, have recently met. Both women are 23. They are in the neat but somewhat
drab studio apartment that Luna shares with her (unseen) husband. (The set design is by Junghyun Georgia Lee, who also created the costumes.)
It’s Nov. 22, 1973, Thanksgiving night, and 10 years to the day since John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and just days after Richard M. Nixon, increasingly enveloped by the Watergate scandal, insisted that “I am not a crook” at a nationally televised question-andanswer session. (Both events are mentioned in a newscast Luna watches.)
Luna has bought a frozen Thanksgiving turkey but has no idea how to cook it. Jane does, though. Where did she learn? From Julia Child. Who else?
That’s only part of Jane’s TV diet, a reminder of the important role, for good and ill, played by television in shaping the impressions of newcomers to the United States. “Not just Julia Child, everything television, I watch. All day,” she tells Luna. “‘Price Is Right.’ ‘Young and the Restless.’ ‘Sanford and Son,’ Walter Cronkite, Archie Bunker, yes? ‘Sesame Street.’ Husband work. No friends. So I am just same like you.”
The women are trying to acclimate themselves to their new country — and to each other. (They have identical winter coats, which both of them bought at Kmart, a store that Luna likens to a museum for the variety of objects to be found there.) Luna carries the conversation early on, words flying out of her at warp speed, as voluble as Jane is quiet. Awkward silences and non sequiturs ensue.
But Jane starts to loosen up when they start drinking wine, and further still when they don “home clothes,” Luna’s name for pajamas. They talk about their families, and about homesickness (“It’s funny to miss them when I know they don’t miss me the same,” Luna says sadly). They talk about how fundamentally weird Halloween is, and the political climate of the countries they came from, and the “bad time,” in Luna’s words, being experienced by the country they came to.
Jane explains why, and in whose honor, she changed her name from Jae Ha. Luna shows Jane her photo album.
Eventually, they dance. They talk halfseriously about going to see a porn movie.
It’s clear they feel safe with each other, talking about things they don’t feel free to talk about with their husbands.
Yet for all they have in common, they are very different women, and Agbayani and Song deliver beautifully calibrated portrayals that make that clear. The actors nail the externals of their characters while suggesting a depth of feeling within each of them, an inner life that’s a space all their own. Agbayani and Song invest small moments with deep meaning (and they also do an excellent job playing drunk, not an easy task).
In an interview with dramaturg Christine Mok, printed in the Huntington program for “The Heart Sellers,” Suh says: “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.’ ”
This playwright’s skill is such that he’s done both.