When you enter New York Theater Workshop to see Endlings, there’s a definition of that term helpfully projected on the curtain. “Endlings” is a plural noun describing “the last known individuals of a species.”
It’s one of the terms you’ll Google to learn more about when you get home from Celine Song’s fascinating and wonderfully complicated new play. (It was invented in the 1990s by a doctor in Georgia, apparently.) The other is haenyeo, another plural noun, this one describing the women at the center of Song’s play: elderly women living on isolated islands in Korean province of Jeju who earn their livings by deep-sea diving for seafood, armed with little more than a wetsuit and a net. It’s an odd, insular, and dying culture, and as such makes fertile territory for Song’s play. But as much as you’ll learn about these endlings at Endlings—and the early scenes are presented as faux-documentary, with an informative voiceover—you’ll want to know more.
Song is a talented young writer. Endlings debuted last year at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. She holds an M.F.A. from Columbia and has had residencies everywhere from The Public Theater to Yaddo. Endlings was a finalist for last year’s Susan Smith Blackbird Prize for women playwrights.
She makes her three elderly divers endearingly, anachronistically cranky and foul-mouthed old salts. They share a traditional existence, but their bond is bro-ily antagonistic. They’re proud that their children live far away and have found better lives. Wai Chung Ho, Emily Kuroda, and Jo Yang portray them with gruff and idiosyncratic charm.
But Song isn’t interested in merely teaching us about this unusual world. She is really using this unique culture, and that fact that it’s disappearing, as a meditation on ethnicity and heritage, on what one generation bequeaths to another. The fourth major character in the play is Ha Young, a 20-something young playwright living in Manhattan and a stand-in for Song. (She is played by Jiehae Park, who is herself both a writer and an actor.) Young tells us the story of her ancestors, of the women who travelled first from the north of Korea to the south, ending up on the opposite side of the 38th parallel from her family once that parallel mattered, and then later traveled from Korea to North America, so that Young (and one images Song) can have the opportunities she does today. The character compares the island the haenyeo live on, in the Korean Strait, to the one she does, between the Hudson and East rivers, and the distance between those two worlds.
Song also grapples with how to be a playwright of Asian descent in an American theater world that is, typically, so relentlessly white. The middle chunk of the play takes us from Korea back to Manhattan, where we watch Young, the playwright character, grapple with how to tell stories that are true to her identity—as she discusses it with her “white playwright” husband, who is wearing a sign proclaiming him just that.
As it moves on, Endlings toggles between the world of the haenyeo and the world of the playwright and sometimes combines the two. As directed by Sammi Cannold with scenic design by Jason Sherwood, costume design by Linda Cho, and lighting design by Bradley King, it creates some gorgeous, whimsical stage images—there’s an upstage tank in which the old women, and also a wise turtle, swim, and later there is a pretty, miniature Manhattan skyline.
But don’t let that whimsy deceive you. Endlings is clever and self-aware, in on its own joke, but it’s also deeply serious. It mocks the modern serious-downtown-theater complex even as it knows it’s a part of it; it admires the haenyeo even as it recognizes what a grueling life they lead; it celebrates family and tradition even as it wrestles with an immigrant’s guilt over the sacrifices that came before.
Like the haenyeo, it dives deep.
Endlings opened March 9, 2020, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through March 29. Tickets and information: nytw.org
