by Mike Hoban
Endlings – Written by Celine Song; Directed by Sammi Cannold; Scenic Design by Jason Sherwood; Costume Design by Linda Cho; Lighting Design by Bradley King; Sound Design by Elisheba Ittoop. Presented by the American Repertory Theater. At Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle St. Cambridge through March 17.
On the surface, Endlings – now being given its world premiere at the A.R.T’s Loeb Center in Cambridge – is about three older women who have spent nearly their entire lives earning a meager existence by diving for seafood from a tiny island off the coast of South Korea. While the subject matter sounds like it would make for an intriguing enough premise on its own, Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song has chosen to expand her darkly comic play to include themes of her own family’s migration to Canada (and eventually New York City) in search of “better real estate”, as well as a wildly comic philosophical discussion of how much one’s ethnic/racial identity should inform their work. Staged on an absolutely gorgeous and cleverly constructed set, the play also smashes the fourth wall to pieces throughout, creating an uneven but highly entertaining and biting comic pastiche.
The play opens with the three elderly haenyeos – a Korean term which translates to “sea women” – discussing their lives as they prepare for the days’ work. We immediately sense that there will be no romanticizing of their existence, which despite the beautiful ocean setting, sounds about as glamorous as coal-mining. They lightheartedly discuss the merits of beating their children, mostly as a way of dissuading them from following in their footsteps into this dying profession, and their conversations are laced with F-bombs. Despite the bleak-sounding material, the interactions between the women are pretty amusing, even when they’re discussing their deceased husbands, at least one of whom drank and beat his wife. The only source of joy in their lives seems to be watching cable television, as Han Sol, at 98 the oldest of the divers, tells us with her frequent exclamation of, “Television rules! Hollywood forever!”
We soon learn that the women are the subject of a documentary being narrated by an offstage, sunny-voiced, condescending young woman who attempts to imbue their work with a kind of nobility that is clearly at odds with how the women themselves feel about their existence. An all-white, all-male film crew works on the set, making it clear that what we’re seeing is closer to a reality TV show than a theatrical play.
Endlings then takes a radical shift, as an actress (Jiehae Park, a playwright herself) portraying playwright Song appears below the mainstage under a spotlight. “I don’t really like David Henry Hwang’s (who wrote M. Butterfly) work,” she confesses. “And I don’t understand why (Korean-American playwright) Young Jean Lee does what she does. (And) I don’t want to sell my skin for theatre.” As a result, she’s been writing what she calls “white plays”, because she doesn’t want to trade in on her identity (something that black comedians playing to white audiences have been dealing with for years) to achieve commercial success. She follows that admission up by tracing her family history, as her mother takes them on a “thirteen-hour-long one-way plane” ride from Korea when she was a young girl to her living in a “tiny studio apartment” with her white (“also a playwright”) husband for $3,000 a month in New York City.
The play bounces back and forth between the plight of the sea women and Song’s story in NYC – where she actually goes to her own play and sits in the audience and watches – and includes a hilarious sendup of plays about middle class white people with “white people problems”. (Anyone who had as much difficulty as I did sitting through The Humans or ironically, Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, will especially appreciate the latter segment). There’s a lot going on in this play before it gets to its poignant resolve, and most of it works, although it feels at times like a work in progress.
That said, there’s a lot to like about Endlings, not the least of the chances that Song takes with the piece, defying playwriting conventions and saying out loud what must surely be going through the heads of some emerging artists of color. There are also the performances, beginning with the older haenyeos (Wai Ching Ho, Emily Kuroda, Jo Yang) as well as Jiehae Park, who are a joy to watch. The supporting cast of white male stage managers are a hoot, deadpanning their absurd and repetitive “white guy” lines. The set by Jason Sherwood is both a thing of beauty and a technological marvel, as he creates a beautiful seascape with vibrant colors where the women dive in addition to building a sea tank that allows us to see the women actually diving for their bounty (along with a giant sea tortoise played by Mark Mauriello). All in all, it’s an interesting early effort by a promising young playwright, and well worth a look. For ticket and information, go to: www.americanrepertorytheater.org
