What price do immigrants pay when they come to America? A new play offers an answer

The contented of migration has been beforehand and halfway connected our stages this fall. Playwrights are responding not to the headlines (drama plays the agelong game) but to the quality toll of entrenched prejudices and legislative negligence that person turned American authorities into a humor sport.

Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” which ends its tally astatine the Mark Taper Forum connected Sunday, and Rudi Goblen’s “littleboy/littleman,” which had its satellite premiere astatine the Geffen Playhouse past month, bring america person to characters who came to the U.S. for accidental and find themselves trapped successful a bureaucratic nightmare that has relegated them to the shadows of their adopted homeland.

Adding to this database of immigrant-themed enactment this play is Lloyd Suh’s “The Heart Sellers,” which opened past play astatine South Coast Repertory. The accumulation is directed by Jennifer Chang, who staged the play’s satellite premiere astatine Milwaukee Repertory Theatre successful 2023 with the aforesaid two-person cast.

Nicole Javier and Narea Kang reprise their roles successful a play that, similar Suh’s “The Far Country” (a Pulitzer Prize finalist successful 2023), views the hot-button contented of migration done the lens of history. The play, acceptable successful 1973 successful an unnamed midsize American city, revolves astir 2 women, 1 from the Philippines, the different from South Korea, who are portion of the question of Asian migration that was made imaginable by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, colloquially known arsenic Hart-Celler aft Sen. Philip Hart and Rep. Emanuel Celler who co-sponsored the bill.

A adjuvant programme enactment by dramaturg Adrian Trujillo Centeno explains that the instrumentality eliminated “the nationalist origins quota strategy that had favored Northern and Western Europeans since the 1920s.” But President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the legislation, didn’t foresee however “this well-intentioned betterment would trigger 1 of the astir melodramatic demographic transformations successful American past portion simultaneously facilitating caller forms of favoritism that persist today.”

Narea Kang, left, and Nicole Javier successful South Coast Repertory’s 2025 accumulation of “The Heart Sellers” by Lloyd Suh, directed by Jennifer Chang.

(Robert Huskey / South Coast Repertory)

The caller migration criteria acceptable retired to beryllium much neutral (family reunification and nonrecreational skills), but improvements successful 1 country led to difficulties successful another. Human beings are infinitely much assorted than administrative categories.

Luna (Javier) and Jane (Kang) are some joined to men who are aesculapian residents astatine the aforesaid hospital. But their babelike presumption prohibits their employment, casting them into the murky relation of supportive yet alienated spouses who person had to relinquish much than their afloat overseas names.

Set connected Thanksgiving night, “The Heart Sellers” can’t disguise its artificial setup. Luna has invited Jane backmost to her flat aft moving into her astatine the supermarket portion whimsically picking up a frozen turkey she hasn’t a hint however to cook. The 2 women — implicit strangers, for each intents and purposes — are jittery astir each different until they observe however overmuch they person successful common.

Both their husbands enactment astatine night, leaving them unsocial to brood connected each they person near behind. Loneliness is endemic to their lives, and Luna, an ebullient personality, seems to beryllium suffering from acute compartment fever.

She’s truthful anxious to marque a person that she acts wholly “goofy,” arsenic she herself yet acknowledges. Jane, whose timidity is evident successful the mode she lone reluctantly takes disconnected her wintertime coat, behaves arsenic though she’s been abducted by an overly solicitous kidnapper.

Suh’s ngo present is akin to that of Bioh’s and Goblen’s successful their respective plays: to humanize characters whose lives person been cruelly politicized. The occupation with “The Heart Sellers” is that Luna and Jane are saddled with a contrived premise that doesn’t let them capable country for melodramatic complexity.

They devour processed snacks, unfastened a vessel of vino and hole the turkey with paltry ingredients and Jane’s Julia Child ingenuity. As they turn much comfy successful each other’s company, they stock stories of their erstwhile lives and the affectional sacrifices they person had to conceal. (The rubric tips disconnected the Faustian bargain that migration entails.)

Another vessel of vino and the women wholly fto their hairsbreadth down. Having been pent up for truthful long, friendless and homesick, they spell chaotic successful the information of Luna’s generic apartment, which scenic decorator Tanya Orellana furnishes with makeshift postgraduate schoolhouse touches. A carton serves arsenic an extremity array and a tract seat makes nary apologies for itself successful the surviving area. This location is intelligibly a pit stop.

The women imagination up dissolute scenarios for themselves arsenic they creation themselves into a frenzy and driblet their facades. It turns retired there’s rather a spot of sadness down Luna’s bubbliness and a bully woody of alloy underneath Jane’s docile demeanor.

But Suh relies connected comic stereotypes to prolong melodramatic momentum. The deficiency of consequential enactment forces the playwright’s hand, and the characters permission a strained content that’s exacerbated by the performers.

“The Far Country,” successful which Suh examines the harsh realities of Chinese immigrants successful San Francisco during the Chinese Exclusion Act era, is simply a acold much analyzable piece, raising questions astir motivation enactment successful an immoral system. “The Heart Sellers” embodies humanities worldly that’s each spot arsenic significant, but the play’s constrictive scope diminishes the interaction of this saccharine yet theatrically unconvincing Thanksgiving visit.