8 hours Ago
It’s Thanksgiving of 1973 and Luna and Jane, two freshly arrived Asian immigrants, have just met at an urban American supermarket. Realizing that they’d each be spending the holiday alone while their medical resident husbands work at a hospital, the loquacious Luna invites shy Jane to her apartment for dinner. Over the course of 90 real-time minutes, they forge a friendship built around a common sense of loss of their cultures and communities, the impressions of America they’ve gleaned from their brief time here, and imagining what their futures might be like.
Jenna Agbayani (Luna) and Juyeon Song (Jane) portray two recent immigrants to the United States who decide to share Thanksgiving dinner after randomly meeting at a grocery store in the Guthrie Theater’s production of “The Heart Sellers,” playing through Jan. 25, 2025. (Dan Norman / Guthrie Theater) I highly recommend that you accept an invitation to join them.
Currently bringing some midwinter warmth to the Guthrie Theater’s smaller proscenium stage, Lloyd Suh’s comedy, “The Heart Sellers,” is a disarmingly intimate and note-perfect play about two women seeking connection while feeling isolated in their strange new country. Funny, insightful and absorbing, it benefits from Suh’s astounding ear for believable dialogue and two extraordinarily well-crafted portrayals. The play’s genesis came when Suh and director May Adrales fell into a conversation about their mothers.
They soon realized that their family matriarchs had arrived in the U.S. at around the same time, benefitting from a late-1960s easing of anti-Asian immigration policy.
Suh’s mother came from South Korea, Adrales’ from the Philippines. Adrales suggested that Suh write a play about what it must have been like to be an Asian woman in that situation, and secured a commission from Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where “The Heart Sellers” premiered last year. After a production at Boston’s Huntington Theater, it won the American Theatre Critics Association’s award for the best new American play of 2023.
Director Adrales has brought the cast and design team from that Boston staging to the Guthrie, which might partially account for this production’s distinctly lived-in feel. While Wilson Chin’s set displays the less-than-cozy aspects of circa-’70 design – particularly the cold, cinder-block apartment complex exterior that gazes down upon the characters – Luna and Jane gradually suffuse the setting with a tender combination of curiosity and compassion, spiked with an exuberant “Soul Train”-inspired dance-off and some comical cooking adventures. Both Jenna Agbayani’s Luna and Juyeon Song’s Jane prove fascinating companions.
Agbayani opens the show with an almost exhausting gusher of words, Luna’s ebullient excitement at a new visitor contrasting with Song’s hums of response subtly dipping and rising as if to alter their meaning. Clearly, Filipino Luna’s command of English is much stronger than that of the Korean Jane, but we gradually learn that Jane understands more than she’s letting on. And the monologues in which each character confronts her loneliness and loss prove powerful in their own understated way.
Even the awkward silences speak volumes about these two women, director Adrales using pace to excellent effect throughout the show. It’s clear that playwright Suh possesses one of the most uniquely gifted voices in American theater. I’ve loved everything I’ve seen by him, from Children’s Theatre Company’s productions of “The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!” and “Bina’s Six Apples” to Theater Mu’s “Charles Francis Chan Jr.
’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery.” Suh has a truly rare combination of ear and imagination, and it comes through quiet and clear in this touching comedy. Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.
com . ‘The Heart Sellers’ When: Through Jan. 25 Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 Second St.
S., Minneapolis Tickets: $85-$16.50, available at 612-377-2224 or guthrietheater.
org Capsule: An insightful offering of midwinter warmth. Related Articles.
